[TriLUG] new project: networked video cameras

[Pat Regan]

Greg Brown wrote:
>> 
>> If "Motion" is what I believe it is, I set it up a few years ago.  This
>> is from memory, as I do not have access to the system.
> 
> Oh yeah, looking at your mpg it is the same thing.
> 

Cool, it was a very nice little piece of software.

>> I set it up to drop jpegs into a directory as fast as it could, which
>> was slow but it was exactly what we wanted.  I had a cron job run every
>> X minutes and convert the jpeg files to an mpeg movie and delete the
>> jpegs.  The mpegs were dated and stored in another web accessible
>> directory.  It worked quite well.
> 
> How'd you do that?  Convert the jpgs to mpg I mean.  What software did you use?
> 

I am pretty sure I used the 'convert' program from Imagemagick.  I just
tested it with the command:

convert *.jpg test.mpg

Which I believe should lump all the jpegs in the current directory into
an mpeg.  Unfortunately it gave me an error about not locating
mpeg2encode. I may have had to install that separately.

You will have to forgive me because my memories of this are a bit fuzzy,
but here basically what I remember doing.

First I had somehow save jpeg files with a timestamp in the filename.

Every 5 minutes cron would kick off a script that ran convert on the
jpegs and then deleted them so things would start fresh.  I probably
moved them to a temp folder so motion could continue to do its thing.

The cron job also updated a very simple index.html file that was just a
bunch of links to the mpeg files.

I also remember I set up a kind of 'live camera' we page that refreshed
every 5 seconds.  I assume that was a perl CGI that linked to whatever
the newest image was.  It was a very crude live view, but it was handy
to make sure things were working correctly.

If there is any more information I can get you that would help, just let
me know.

Pat
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