Motion

Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion.

LinuxMCE h0as a wrapper that connects to Motion. You add this wrapper as an "Interface" on the Interface page. It is called, "Motion Wrapper". You must have this interface prior to setting up your cameras.

The program is written in C and is made for the Linux operating system. Motion is a command line based tool whose output can be either jpeg, ppm fies or mpeg video sequences. Motion is the perfect tool for keeping an eye on your property, keeping only those images that are interesting.

For detailed info see the Motion website

Features

• Taking snapshots of movement
• Watch multiple video devices at the same time
• Watch multiple inputs on one capture card at the same time
• Live streaming webcam (using multipart/x-mixed-replace)
• Real time creation of mpeg movies using libraries from ffmpeg
• Take automated snapshots on regular intervals
• Take automated snapshots at irregular intervals using cron
• Execute external commands when detecting movement (and e.g. send SMS or email)
• Motion tracking (camera follow motion - special hardware required)
• Feed events to a MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
• Feed video back to a video4linux loopback for real time viewing
• Lots of user contributed related projects with web interfaces etc.
• User configurable and user defined on screen display.
• Control via browser (older versions used xml-rpc)
• Automatic noise and threshold control
• Motion is a daemon with low CPU consumption and small memory footprint.

Adding IP cameras to motion

Axis camera is auto detected and device is generated, but not under Motion as parent. If you run IP Camera under moton you get all features motion has (motion detection,recording,etc...). Quick and not so clean workaround for adding IP camera device under Motion:

1. Add Generic Analog Camera #66 Device
   
2. Change Configuraton field to add data for IP camera
   
   

Example for Axis camera :

netcam_url  http://192.168.0.90/axis-cgi/jpg/image.cgi?resolution=640x480
netcam_userpass username:password    

Omit last one if you don't have any access password specified.

Compiling (contributing) to Motion Wrapper in LinuxMCE

On 0.41 version of LinuxMCE I wanted to incorporate few changes into Motion wrapper. I decided to compile it and described procedure here.

Interesting related projects

Since there will probably be some discussion about the future of video surveillance under LMCE, I'll enumerate here few interesting projects...

Kmotion Web Viewer

Zoneminder