ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,
First of all, I'd like to congratulate on a great piece of software. I was quite amazed at the maturity and amount of features available with Zone Minder. We recently started to consider deploying a series of security cameras around our institute, and Zone Minder is everything we were looking for. With the exception of one small thing :)

Time windows for cameras. Some of the areas we want to monitor will be high traffic areas, that will result in a lot of activity that is really not required. However, we want to monitor those places after hours. So the feature request is very basic: would it be possible to implement a time frame, in which the given camera is in the active mode? Even better, rather than have it based on one day/24hrs, create a week based one? Say I could specify which cameras are in the active mode 5PM-8AM during a weekday and 24 hours a day on a weekend?

Sincerely,
dom

Hi Dominic,

This, I think, is probably quite a common requirement. The easiest way to simulate it at the moment is either to

1) Set all cameras to active mode and then use cron jobs to force alarms off (which disables motion detection) with zmu, and then to cancel the force off when required also. This solution means that the zma (analysis daemons will always be running).

2) Set the cameras to X10 mode (even though you don't have X10) and then use cron jobs to start and stop the zma daemons with zmdc.pl. This is slightly more efficient as the zma daemons only run when necessary.

3) Set the cameras to X10 and use X10 to control when the cameras come on and off, for instance my cameras only do motion detection/recording when my alarm is armed and an X10 event is sent.

These are you choices at the moment. In the next release (probably, though possibly the one ofter that) the issue of triggering will be better addressed allowing various external triggers (not just X10) to exercise this kind of control. A timer based one will probably be included, or at least be supported if someone want to write one.

Cheers,

Phil,