Can zoneminder do video timeline browsing easily?

[pbrown123]

New to zoneminder. I just started checking it out via the docker image, zoneminderhq/zoneminder:latest-ubuntu18.04

I was going to see if I could do the following setup:

Set up the system to record 2 cameras all the time, watching a lab area.
Have a retention period of about a week.
Allow my users to be able to go in, with a particular date and time in mind, and be able to show video 15 seconds before and 15 seconds after.

The problem is, while I got the cameras to show up, and I supposedly pressed the "always record" button....
I dont see any options to browse a timeline.
And when I go try to look at the raw files... I dont see any recorded video. I just see a bunch of snapshot .jpgs.

Am I just using the wrong configs? SHOULD it be capable of doing what I described above?
If so, can anyone suggest what I'm missing?

[dougmccrary]

Partial answer - you have "Save JPEGs" turned on in the "Storage" page. You may be able to turn that off completely, or at least record only analysis jpegs. Test to see.
If you squint real hard, there's an .mp4 buried in the forest of .jpegs.

[pbrown123]

Thanks for the reply.

Seems like I'm getting closer...
I had savejpegs ON, but VideoWriter OFF. Dohhhh

But now when I try to save the changes, its giving me a popup,

"Path must be set to a valid value. We have detected invalid characters !*'()$ ,#[] "

Umm.. what? WHAT "path"?? I dont see any value, among the NINE side menus. sigh.

would be really helpful if it localized its error message more.

[dougmccrary]

Most likely the Source->Source Path, if you have a basic setup.
Can you save if you don't change anything?
Otherwise, IDK, but look around for paths/url places. The save buttons save all the monitor pages, not just the one you're on.

[iconnor]

Urls can't contain weird characters. They have to be % encoded. For example a space becomes %20. You can google for a table of values.

I improved this a lot in 1.37 by splitting out the user and password so that if the password has weird characters we can deal with that intelligently.

Also you can often get away with it, but especially @ will really confuse things.

[pbrown123]

Most likely the Source->Source Path, if you have a basic setup.
Can you save if you don't change anything?
Otherwise, IDK, but look around for paths/url places. The save buttons save all the monitor pages, not just the one you're on.

my rtsp path has user login info. If there's another way to do that, seems like it should be on that same page.
If there isnt... seems like zoneminder should do the encoding automatically.

[dougmccrary]

Isaac -

Urls can't contain weird characters.

Well, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_R ... ier#Syntax

An optional query component preceded by a question mark (?), consisting of a query string of non-hierarchical data. Its syntax is not well defined, but by convention is most often a sequence of attribute–value pairs separated by a delimiter.

...

The scheme- or implementation-specific reserved character + may be used in the scheme, userinfo, host, path, query, and fragment, and the scheme- or implementation-specific reserved characters !, $, &, ', (, ), *, ,, ;, and = may be used in the userinfo, host, path, query, and fragment. Additionally, the generic reserved character : may be used in the userinfo, path, query and fragment, the generic reserved characters @ and / may be used in the path, query and fragment, and the generic reserved character ? may be used in the query and fragment.[33]

edit re the last paragraph and note 33 rfc3986#section-2.1

reserved = gen-delims / sub-delims

gen-delims = ":" / "/" / "?" / "#" / "[" / "]" / "@"

sub-delims = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")"
/ "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="