ZoneMinder Forums

I have now completely removed my old Chinese made DVR's and replaced the whole system with a ZoneMinder server. So far, a good experience.

There is one critical feature I need, that is a permanent 24x7 display (montage) of all cameras on the property, in our main office. To do this, I used Ubuntu Desktop, so that I could have Firefox running permanently displaying the montage out the video port on the server, shown on a big screen in the office.

Problem is, every few hours, one or more video panes locks-up. I look at it now, and 7 panes show live video, one is stuck on an image from 6 hours ago. Not good.

Any suggestions on a better, more reliable way to accomplish this? This was a standard feature in the old junk DVR.

I don't know the solution, but do know that a single monitor left open will run happily for ages, until the desktop it's on gets a little bit busy, then it freezes.

If the computer is busy for too long (10 seconds is enough), it stays frozen, otherwise it splutters back into life

An F5 refreshes it and restarts it, but that's obviously not ideal.

I wonder if the mechanism used to deliver the live view needs a timeout to handle this situation and relaunch itself, as if it happens a lot, I start getting "Too many database connections" errors and the machine load quietly creeps up and up ... zombie processes left about?

Thanks for that.
Just fyi, this is a dedicated server, nothing at all running on it except that zoneminder display.

It's been a long time since I've used it, but Firefox has an auto refresh plugin that you can set to refresh the page at set intervals, I find my zm sometimes does the same at home but I seldom watch it for hours so I just hit f5

https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefo ... o-refresh/

you can create your own html page that will connect to the cameras directly. This will lighten the load on the server and the images wont freeze unless your cameras mess up. Thats if you have IP cameras. You could still make a custom html page that connects to the zoneminder server to grab the images and have the page refresh every once in a while. Doing it this way you can make one camera larger and the others smaller or have any sizes you want to make it fit the whole screen.

theforce wrote:you can create your own html page that will connect to the cameras directly.

You can, and I have done for a low-calorie "montage" page. But the advantage of keeping a real live monitor open is the recent events list (just below) allows a quick wind-back to see what just happened!

But on general principle, the ZM built in monitors shouldn't lock up (but I don't know exactly why they do, so can't really figure it out!)

Yes, my montage is a modified version of the zoneminder page too.
But, having events in the list is pointless because there is no keyboard or mouse to click them. It is a wall display only.

You using analog cams? What I do is run my analog cams into a quad with pass-through capability. The quad passes the signals to my capture cards for ZM and I have a LCD monitor that receives the montage view from the quad. You can find some pretty nice used 'pro' quality quads on eBay if you hunt around. I picked up a really heavy duty 'Robot' branded unit for under $50 a few years back.

linuxsense wrote:You using analog cams? What I do is run my analog cams into a quad with pass-through capability. The quad passes the signals to my capture cards for ZM and I have a LCD monitor that receives the montage view from the quad. You can find some pretty nice used 'pro' quality quads on eBay if you hunt around. I picked up a really heavy duty 'Robot' branded unit for under $50 a few years back.

Well, I started with analog cams, but now have some IP cams, and we are planning on integrated my neighbors cams into the mix too, over a wifi link. This was the final reason I dumped the analog dvr and started working with ZoneMinder.

But I hear you on the quads. That won't cut at my house though. I have a home automation system and I need to be able to pull feeds from cameras, on demand, into the house status display.

ZoneMinder has the ability to do all of this, if I can just get it stable.

It amazing how far we've come in 20 years since I used 24 hour tape loops recording in sub-VHS quality.

Another option would be to mount an iPad or Android tablet on the wall and run "IP Cam Viewer" to show your ZM feed. Might be a decent solution with a refurbished Android tablet if you can get one cheap, probably a lot harder to find a cheap iPad.