In my last post I described my video surveillance system in Linux. Can’t say that I’m 100% pleased with it though, so I thought I’d try a console program called motion instead. It pretty much does the same thing, but I don’t have to use a web interface etc. This is, just like ZoneMinder, just a matter of apt-get install motion.

The first problem I ran into was that my webcam wouldn’t work with motion, no idea why. It just gave me a bunch of error messages and no pictures. I swapped it for an older Logitech model (with some strange picture artefacts, but hey… it works).

Image from motion

In motion you can set the numbers of pixels that have to change between each picture to use as motion detection. Further you can run a web service where you can access the picture(s). This seems more suited for my needs, no fancy stuff!

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