Creating videos with ffmpeg when FPS is below 25

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 9:51 pm

that much!!

James

Post by **zoneminder** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 10:07 pm

Yes. The whole GUI is now driven by interactive smiley 'assistants' who will pop up continuously and ask if you want to view a camera, or do something else instead.

Phil

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 10:30 pm

NO PLEASE NO
sounds like ms office assistant to me please say you havnt sold out!!

JAmes

SyRenity · Post by **SyRenity** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:23 pm

Hi Phil.

I tried to follow your instruction, and modified the zmvideo.pl accordingly:
my $command = ZM_PATH_FFMPEG." -y ".ZM_FFMPEG_OPTIONS." -r $frame_rate -s ${width}x${height} -i %0".ZM_EVENT_IMAGE_DIGITS."d-capture.jpg -r 25 $video_file > mpeg.log";

The live streaming videos are still not working (as they always do

).

Update: Well, just learned a new bit - all the online video is generated via zmMonitor, StreamMPEG function. Phil, if you made there any small change that caused the live streaming to finally work, could you please post this small piece of code?

Post by **zoneminder** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 4:11 pm

The changes I had to make to do with streaming were just to get it to work with CVS ffmpeg. AFAIK it works fine with previous versions of the libraries.

Which version are you trying to use and what issues do you have?

Phil

SyRenity · Post by **SyRenity** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 8:39 pm

Hi Phil.

Well, I'm always (as long as I can remember using ZM) getting a black screen when trying to view a live (or playback - not the generated, this works fine) video. The WMP I have tried (both 9 and 10) are simply not able to display the stream, and even doesn't start buffering it. Tried from many XP computers, both with SP1 and SP2.

I will gladly install the CVS version and apply your changes, if it will finally solve the situation.

My current version of FFMPEG is the one distributed with FC4 (0.4.9-0.2.20050427).

Post by **cordel** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 9:32 pm

I have been successfuly running 0.4.8 since I started using zm (well I think it was 0.4.7 or a bit earlier but I stopped at .

with out any issues up till recently (maybe my own fault ) but it stills works for both streaming and generation. Although I oppsed and had tried to build on cvs some time back and forgot that the shared libs were still installed (till last month) so every time I built zm appearently it used the CVS version of the libaries

My box that I religh on for watching my driveway had the same thing (since I installed there for testing and made the same mistake. Some how it still worked

[scratching head]

Now if I remove the ffmpeg libs from CVS install of coarse it breaks, even though the 0.4.8 libs are there. I tried to rebuild zm on the old Libaries and keep getting errors about ffmpeg and some undefined calls.

I'll get the build enviroment back up and try rebuilding with 0.4.8 and when Phil makes his release work on the CVS version (I downloaded from CVS shortly after Phil) I'll get them both packaged up and have it all available for DL.

Regards,
Cordel

SyRenity · Post by **SyRenity** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 5:41 pm

Hi Cordel.

From my own expirience, not the 0.4.8, nor the 0.4.9 CVS have ever worked for me. Because of this, I'm so eager to finally get it running, even if this includes both installing the CVS and patching the code.

SyRenity · Post by **SyRenity** » Sun Oct 23, 2005 7:25 pm

Hi.

Well, I was finally able to stream a video from ZM. There are 2 caveats thought, one is quite large:

1) I had to rollback the FFMPEG to 0.4.8.

2) Most seriously, the Windows Media Player is unable to advance more then the first frame - this is the effect I always had. Today, I got an idea of playing the stream via Classic Media Player, and behold, it all works and streams properly.

This is a serious limitation thought, as it means that you can't use the WMP ActiveX player from within the browser. Moreover, you also can't use the "Montage" feature.

This effect with WMP is seen on version 10 - perhaps with a lesser version it works ok?

Phil, does your development version work with the latest WMP? It probably means that FFMPEG CVS has resolved this issue.

Post by **zoneminder** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 4:16 pm

I can't remember to be honest. I'm trying to find time to push the release out this week and then people who know more about this than me can hopefully shed some light.

It's a bit fiddly doing a patch as I think it needs new config etc.

Phil

Post by **cordel** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 7:11 pm

For those that are using the FC rpm, I cleaned my enviroment and rebuilt ZM on the correct libraries. I haven't yet had a chance to test it though. I'll load it this evening.
If any one wants to test it it is at:
http://www.computerntelecom.com/pub/lin ... testing/3/

Regards,
Cordel

SyRenity · Post by **SyRenity** » Wed Nov 02, 2005 10:42 am

Great news, Phil.

I will gladly test run it and will share my findings regarding the streaming issues, so we could finally solve it.

BTW, perhaps we should consider splitting or moving this thread from 1.19.x to 1.2x.x?

SyRenity · Post by **SyRenity** » Sun Nov 06, 2005 3:24 pm

Hi.

I discovered why the 0.4.9 version of FFMPEG does not work. Every time the zms tries to start streaming the video, it crashes with the message "Could not open codec", which source is located in zm_mpeg.cpp, line 130. Apparently, the FFMPEG developers have changed the API which broke backwards compatibility.

Phil, you probably aware of this one, and have addressed this in the upcoming version?

Post by **zoneminder** » Sun Nov 06, 2005 3:42 pm

Yes. There were various things broken. I'm trying to polish off the next release today but at the moment I have to do proper work instead unfortunately.

Phil