Inconsistent clip lengths

[superdipak]

An update on my problem and the analysis I have done in the past one week or so:

I had earlier explained that all my cameras are monitored with a software called nagios which runs on the same server as ZM and which works by pinging each camera every 5 minutes. Generally this is fine for my purposes but to monitor my cameras closely, I wrote a script to ping each one of them every second and write the output to an individual file for each camera. I was curious to find out if my video streams are being interrupted by momentary loss of connectivity and was hoping that my per-sec ping report would provide an insight into that.

I am pleasantly surprised that this ping script has completely solved my problem. In other words, when my cameras are being pinged every sec, the video streams are always healthy and my clip lengths are consistent. I have not had a single occurrence of the original problem in the last 5 days that my ping script has been running for. It seems the per-sec pings are somehow keeping the video streams alive and interruption-free.

While I now have a workaround, I am wondering if there are any additional options I can pass into ffmpeg to emulate the pings? Or does ZM provide any other configuration option to emulate this kind of "keep-alive" communication between itself and cameras? Ideally I would like to get rid of my ping script and am hoping this forum can point me to something within ZM that could potentially resolve the issue on these lines.

[Magic919]

Doesn’t seem to be a ZM problem. Sounds like the network to me.

[dougmccrary]

What magic said. Do you perhaps have a "green" switch or something on your network? They can go to sleep and cause problems.