Re: [mh] Zoneminder (was Re: Massive Edit of Insteon Wiki Pages)

[Eloy P. <pe...@ch...>]

Hi Dustin,

On 04/09/2013 06:18 PM, Dustin Robinson wrote:

> I had MUCH better luck with my foscams once I hardwired them.  Motion
> sensing accuracy improved, server load went down for some reason and
> zoneminder became more stable.

Great; thanks for the feedback. I guess I may have to look into 
connecting at least some of these cameras to my network via Ethernet if 
I cannot stabilize them over the wi-fi network. My house is well wired 
for Ethernet, and I have a few available ports in my Ethernet switch, 
but even then it's a bit of additional work to connect them via Ethernet 
compared to the simplicity of a wireless set up.

Right this moment things are looking good -- I have four cameras 
streaming 5 frames/sec at 320x240 and ZoneMinder has not had any 
problems. iptraf reports 1.6 mbits/sec. A couple of hours ago I was 
getting 1.8 mbits/sec with only 3 cameras so I guess that when it's dark 
the video generated by the cameras can be compressed more. I'll have to 
wait until tomorrow when it's very bright to see how the 4 cameras 
affect the wireless network.

But, it's definitely stable at the moment. The trick seems to have been 
to move closer to the wi-fi Access Point one of the four cameras that 
was in an area with weak signal. After doing that the network seemed to 
stabilize. I don't know if it's just a coincidence (and the problem was 
caused by something else, like contention as a result of my neighbors' 
wi-fi networks running on my same channel, or adjacent channels, and 
that something else went away), or having a wi-fi device with weak 
signal really affects the overall health of the network (perhaps a high 
number of retries kills the network, or something like that).


> At the same time I put power over the
> unused pairs and it is working great.  No more wall warts everywhere and
> now the cameras are powered by the same ups as all my server and network
> gear.

This seems very nice. How did you do this; is there some off-the-shelve 
product that makes this easy to do without creating a wiring mess on 
both sides?

> I am currently running 640.480 at 2fps.  I like the added image size and
> don't find that I need any fore fps.

That's another benefit of wired; it remains to be seen whether I'll be 
able to do everything over wi-fi at 320x240, let alone 640x480.

> I also wrote a new object which triggers record events in mh through
> zoneminder's zmtrigger.

I'd be curious to know how you did this; is it user code that you wrote?

Cheers,

Eloy Paris.-