ZM does do 960HD. I have 5 Foscam 9831W cameras running at that resolution.
It's a little hard to help as I don't have an idea of your complete setup, but here are my thoughts
Some notes:
a) If you really want to use ZM, you'll have to experiment and iterate. It's open source and most people answering here are regular forum users like you, which means responses will be sporadic and will involve you having to tinker around. If you don't want to do that, you should probably use blueiris if it is working out of the box. It may also be possible those helping you many not know how to help you beyond a point - unless some ZM expert like knnnigget (I can never spell his username correctly, especially since the Monty Python reference uses a different spelling

) notices this thread - he knows the source code well and is a maintainer while the rest of us are mostly users.
Some questions (my apologies if you have already answered some)
a) Was there any improvement after moving to RTP/RTSP compared to before? If so, what sort of improvement. Please differentiate between 'choppy' and 'slow'. Choppy means low frame rate but what you see is more or less in sync with the real world - probably offset only by 2-3 seconds at most. Slow means ZM is running way behind what is really happening
b) How many cameras do you have configured? If you have more than one, can you delete all except one and we can debug that. Once you only have one monitor configured, bump up in-camera to 30fps and keep maxFPS at ZM to blank. View the ZM feed and let me know if you feel its 'real time' enough. If so, then your ZM installation should be fine. Keep an eye on the system load and memory consumption too while you are viewing the 30fps feed
c) How did you install zone minder? please be specific - did you install from source or a package?
d) For one monitor please paste the values in all tabs (general/source/misc/buffer)
e) RTP/Unicode never worked for me - too many packet drops even within the LAN and adding ?tcp completely messed up my ZM (sql timeouts) (which is different from what bbunge said above - you will have to see which route works better for you). Switching to RTP/RTSP forces a tcp path from ZM making ?tcp unnecessary in this mode.
f) Post more logs while you are viewing the live images in ZM - lets see what all is going on there
g) Are your cameras and ZM in the same LAN?
h) I think you mentioned dual opteron. How much memory do you have installed? Is this machine dedicated to ZM?
themagicm wrote:Lowering resolution isnt an option. 320x180 ? man..sounds like a thumbnail pic. LOL.
so ZM cant do 960HD? What I'm trying to do is set this up for a friend of mine at his shop and I *dont* want to use Windows..prefer something like ZM since thats all I have every used for *years*....but if ZM just cant do it the I'll just have to have him use Blue Iris since it works perfect there (sucks though..because I badly want to use ZM).