Ffmpeg

ffmpeg is a set of video processing tools used by ZoneMinder to generate video files from the frames captured and saved. It has always been under heavy development.

FFMPEG is used in two fashions in Zoneminder. For exporting videos, an ffmpeg binary is used (vers. 1.30.4) If you examine the source code, you will see zm_ffmpeg.cpp which uses libavcodec, which is library for the functions that the ffmpeg binary provides which you can wrap into a program (such as ZM).

FFMPEG Video Export Options

Ffmpeg is used in exporting events to downloadable video files. Exporting video is done using the zmvideo.pl script.

You can control the options that get passed to ffmpeg during the export process using 2 config options found in the Images tab of the options dialog.

FFMPEG_INPUT_OPTIONS

usually leave this empty

FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS

Here are some possible settings:

To obtain a good quality export x264 based mp4 video file - the following example works... -r 30 -vcodec libx264 -threads 2 -b 2000k -minrate 800k -maxrate 5000k

If you want as fast as possible h264(with some sacrifice in quality) you can try -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast