ffmepg options

Add any particular hints or tricks you have found to help with your ZoneMinder experience.
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lukew151
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jul 14, 2009 8:31 pm
Location: England

ffmepg options

Post by lukew151 »

Hi,

I'm having trouble setting up ffmpeg to export video files from zoneminder. I've not found any guidance except on the main wiki page, which helpfully suggests you look at the ffmepg documentation!

If I download the jpg files in a tar file and unpack them I can create a video file with the following command (stolen from http://electron.mit.edu/~gsteele/ffmpeg/):

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -b 1800 -i %03d-capture.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 out.avi
My best attempt to fit this command line into zoneminder's option fields goes like this:

Code: Select all

FFMPEG_INPUT_OPTIONS  "-b 1800"
FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS   "-vcodec mpeg4"
which doesn't work!

Has anyone got this working, can you let me know the trick!

Thanks,

Luke
lukew151
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jul 14, 2009 8:31 pm
Location: England

fixed!

Post by lukew151 »

Where to start, mostly my own stupidity was stopping this working, however as it's now working I'll note down what I did so others don't waste as much time as I have on this problem!

(1) you need to generate the video before you export it! I was missing this option because of my video side (400x300) the options across the top of the event were wrapping around. "Video" is last in the list, but was appearing exactly under "Delete" so appeared to be a single option called "Delete Video". Yes, please don't reply telling me how stupid I am.

(2) I was struggling to generate videos because I had parts of two installs of ffmpeg installed. I had downloaded and compiled the latest ffmpeg source (along with the latest zoneminder source). I hadn't uninstalled all of the packaged libraries relating to ffmpeg which my distro (Debian) had installed. Namely I had to manually uninstall the packages libavcodec, libavdevice, libavformat and libavutil which were conflicting with the version of ffmepg I had compiled.

It's worth noting down for the benefit of other people, if your video generation fails, zoneminder helpful puts the output from ffmpeg into a file called ffmpeg.log in the event folder (/var/www/events/2/73/ in my case)

Luke
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