Zmodopipe

ZmodoPipe

Zmodopipe is a tool that can take the stream from certain model of DVRs and provide that stream through a Named Pipe where programs, including Zoneminder (through zm_ffmpeg_camera.cpp) and ffmpeg can read that stream.

User Case

I purchased a Night Owl Poseidon DVR in the hopes of getting zmodopipe to work with it. This is what I found.

Equipment: Ubuntu 14.04, Zoneminder 1.30, Night Owl Poseidon DVR8, Zmodopipe .41, ffmpeg 3.0 compiled from source (used current ffmpeg ppa for libraries)

Setup

Follow forum guide steps. Download and compile.

There are various quirks not mentioned in the thread which serves as its documentation. A lot of people have been confused.

Running Dots: When you have zmodopipe running in verbose mode (-v flag) and connect sucessfully to the DVR you will see a stream of dots. This means the pipe is created and ready for a reader. At this point zmodopipe will be using 0% CPU and 0% Memory. This is normal for named pipes at this point.

Dots stopping: When you connect a reader (Zoneminder or ffmpeg) to the pipe, the dots will stop. Again, this is normal behavior. You should see some CPU usage on the program accessing the pipe.