For those of you in the market for a cheap webcam for videoconferencing or home surveillance, the Logitech C270 is hard to beat at about $20-25 USD. It can record video at 1280×960 and it's fairly good at low light levels. The white balance gets a bit off when it's bright in the room but hey — this camera is cheap.
ZoneMinder can monitor multiple cameras connected via USB or network. Setting up the C270 with ZoneMinder is relatively straightforward. (Getting ZoneMinder installed and running is well outside the scope of this post.)
Adjust groups
If a user wants to access the webcam in Linux, they must be in the video group. On my system, ZoneMinder runs as the apache user. I needed to add the apache user to the video group:
Configuring the C270
- Camera Control¶. ZoneMinder provides the facility to control cameras from the web interface and to some extent automatically. Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) cameras have a wide range of capabilities and use a large number of different protocols making any kind of generic control solution potentially very difficult.
- With a full featured web based interface, as well as Android and iOS apps, you can access ZoneMinder anywhere.
After clicking Add New Monitor, here's the data for each tab:
General Tab:
Configuring the C270
- Camera Control¶. ZoneMinder provides the facility to control cameras from the web interface and to some extent automatically. Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) cameras have a wide range of capabilities and use a large number of different protocols making any kind of generic control solution potentially very difficult.
- With a full featured web based interface, as well as Android and iOS apps, you can access ZoneMinder anywhere.
After clicking Add New Monitor, here's the data for each tab:
General Tab:
Smart-zoneminder enables fast and accurate object detection, face recognition and upload of ZoneMinder alarm images to an S3 archive where they are made accessible by voice via Alexa. The use of object detection remotely via Rekognition or locally via a TensorFlow -based CNN dramatically reduces the number of false alarms and provides for. ZoneMinder is available just by typing emerge zoneminder. Thanks to the Gentoo web-apps team for making this available. If you can't use a package, or maybe you just prefer to build everything on your own, ZoneMinder uses the cmake system to build from source. See instructions here.
ZoneMinder provides the facility to control cameras from the web interface and to some extent automatically. Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) cameras have a wide range of capabilities and use a large number of different protocols making any kind of generic control solution potentially very difficult.
- Source Type: Local
- Function: Modect
Source:
- Device Path: /dev/video0
- Capture Method: Video For Linux version2
- Device Format: PAL
- Capture Palette: YUYV
- Capture Width: 1280
- Capture Height: 960
Zoneminder Web Interface Tutorial
The width and height settings are suggestions. You can crank them down to something like 640×480 if you'd like to save disk space or get a higher frame rate.
Zoneminder Web Interface
Once you save the configuration and the window disappears, you should see /dev/video0 (0) turn green in the ZoneMinder web interface. If it's red, there may be a different permissions issue to solve or your ZoneMinder instance might be running as a different user than you expected. If the text is yellow/orange, go back and check your camera configuration settings in the ZoneMinder interface.
