[Elphel-support] developing Elphel 353 camera code (for ZoneMinder video surveillance, RTSP)

[Gary Crum]

Hello, for everyone's benefit at Support-list at support.elphel.com, please see my message attached below, and a quick thank-you goes to Sebastian Pichelhofer;   He answered my question about how to "flash" the Elphel 353 camera with newly compiled code.  I was able to compile all code myself, and flash it to the camera using the web GUI, using a URL of this form on my local network:  http://192.168.0.9/reflash.php?NFS=192.168.0.15:/nfs/latest80/
That worked the first time I tried it, and I'm now running the firmware I compiled based on a CVS checkout of the latest 8.0.8.48 firmware.

Sebastian wrote:
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http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=Usage_Tutorials

If your cameras flash image is not totally outdated you can also
reflash over a web gui:
http://blogs.elphel.com/2009/09/firmware-update-made-easier/
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Now, my message on the topic of ZoneMinder video surveillance application was this -- I have no specific question but I appreciate all debugging and code-related suggestions.  I switch to my university e-mail address and want to see if my message is sent out to the list properly this time:

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gary Crum <gc2488 at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 5:53 PM
Subject: developing Elphel 353 camera code (for ZoneMinder video surveillance, RTSP)
To: support-list at support.elphel.com


Hi All, members of support-list at support.elphel.com,

I am working with an Elphel 353 camera, and the ZoneMinder 1.24.2 software for video surveillance running on a separate computer running Linux Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04).  Any related interest here?

My main question:  Can anyone point me to instructions for flashing new code to the 353 camera?  I found and followed instructions for obtaining and building source code, but I don't see the link to flashing and testing instructions.


Read on for more details!

The Elphel wiki page about ZoneMinder use here is good, and suggests that the best solution for this setup will be to use the relatively new RTSP streaming support in both the camera and ZoneMinder:
http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=Elphel_cameras_and_Zoneminder

I have tried using the RTP/RTSP solution, and with verbose debugging enabled in ZoneMinder I see this error in log files:
10/11/10 17:14:43.184461 zmc_m4[6275].FAT-zm_rtsp.cpp/471 [Unable to get RTP Info identifier from response 'RTSP/1.0 200 OK

I obtained source code to ZoneMinder (using "apt-get source --compile zoneminder"), changed it to not require the RTP Info identifier, but then I see failure of the ffmpeg MJPEG codec to decode frames.  I wasn't quite able to enable full debugging in the ffmpeg library as used by ZoneMinder.

So, now I want to go at it from the other side, looking at the implementation of RTSP in the Elphel 353 camera.  I "dove in" and setup my development environment for the camera firmware and compiled it all.  Everything in KDevelop is looking good, free software is great.  I see the relatively new implementation of RTSP in the source file apps/astreamer/rtsp.cpp, with many commented out lines, maybe I can help improve this code and more fully conform to the RTSP specification.  (For example, the RTSP specification at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2326.txt does indeed require an RTP-Info field, in section 12.33.)


I have not yet flashed the Elphel 353 camera with the code I have built, can anyone point me at instructions for doing this?  I think I came across these instructions at one time, but today I don't see the instructions, looking at
http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=Main_Page .

The firmware on the camera I am using is release 8.0.4, and I just checked out and built the current 8.0.8 software using CVS.

Thanks,
-Gary
gc2488 at gmail.com or crum at cs.utah.edu
tel. (801)449-1426
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