Miscellaneous helpful hints

My configuration had red text for the camera name and the device name. Even when I had fixed this, the pictures / video did not appear.

This pages describes the things I had to do to get my set up to work:

• Look in /var/log/messages and /var/log/zoneminder/* for messages. I found in /var/log/messages that the webcam device could not be opened.
• Ensure that the user under which zoneminder is running has access to the webcam device. You can either add the user to the video group (my distro is Gentoo) or (not recommended) do 'chmod a+rwx /dev/v4l/video0'.

Those steps fixed the red webcam and device name, but I still couldn't see any pictures / video.

Next I looked in apache's error log /var/log/apache2/error_log. It said that access to the cgi-bin script that generates the images was denied 'due to server configuration'. I simply added a new 'Directory' section for the cgi-bin directory, giving access, and then things started to work.

NB I am not part of the zoneminder project. This page just contains things which I had to do to get my setup to work. I am using Gentoo.

jpeg SIMD - Increases efficiency of reading and manipulation of jpegs

Motion Detection - a way to make zoneminder learn about the camera image to avoid false alarms