Getting motion installed and working is ubuntu is pretty easy
sudo apt-get install motion
It works pretty well out of the box if you want to use it with a webcam, just try the following
sudo motion
and then look in your webbrowser at 127.0.0.1:8081. Note that by default you have to do it from the server.
Getting it configured properly is the tricky part. I needed to make a few adjustments in particular…
- Select the video device you want to use
- Select a new video format
- Select a new location for storing data (perferably on a different media)
- Split pictures up by day (otherwise the directory just gets too many files)
- Rename files so that they can be sorted in time order by name
- Use the normal port 80
- Enable the motion tracking feature (this saves on images space when nothing is happening)
- Allow other machines to see the server
This is done by making the following adjustments to /etc/motion/motion.conf
daemon off
videodevice /dev/video1
ffmpeg_video_codec flv
target_dir /media/VIDEO
snapshot_filename %m-%d/%v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-snapshot
jpeg_filename %Y-%m-%d/%H-%M-%S-%v-%q
movie_filename %Y-%m-%d/%H-%M-%S-%v
timelapse_filename %Y-%m-%d/%H-%M-timelapse
webcam_port 80
webcam_motion on
webcam_localhost off
After those changes, you can start motion manually (sudo motion) to check that everything was working right.
Getting motion to run as a service
First, enable the service by changing /etc/defaults/motion to the following
start_motion_daemon=yes
Second, the service will try to run as user motion instead of root, but that was a problem since I wanted to use port 80.
I needed to edit the sysinit script at /etc/init.d/motion and look for the following line
if start-stop-daemon --start --oknode --exec $DAEMON -b --child motion ; then
Remove the --child motion part so the line looks like this:
if start-stop-daemon --start --oknode --exec $DAEMON -b ; then
Now you should be able to start motion as a service using
sudo service motion start
Cleaning up files
The final problem is that motion is going to start spitting out images, and will continue to do so until all the space on your machine has been used up. The recommended solution is to use a cron job.
Edit roots cron file using
sudo crontab -e
and add the following line to remove any files motion that are older then 3 days, everyday at 1am.
# m h dom mon dow command
0 1 * * * /usr/bin/find /media/VIDEO -mtime +2 -and -type f -and -name "*jpg" | xargs /bin/rm -f