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Re: [LUG] Exeter Hospital Radio Fun Day

 

On Tuesday 14 August 2007 12:57, Rob Beard wrote:
> Quoting Neil Stone <neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> >> Mark Jose wrote:
> >>> I use motion for wildlife watching - my IR security cam is rigged in
> >>> the garden and motion picks up movement from creatures and begins
> >>> taking still
> >>> images (purely because it saves on disk space) for all the time the
> >>> movement
> >>> is occuring and a couple of seconds before and after.
> >>
> >> How does it manage to take pictures a couple seconds before movement
> >> occurs? :)
> >
> > I am sure we all know that what it does is take pics all the time and bin
> > the non changed ones...
>
> Yup, in the process slowly filling the hard drive :-)
>
> Rob

Not really, because it uses a temporary file for saving those images. Then, 
depending on your settings, if movement occurs, it begins to record to 
whatever filename you have specified - and also includes the stuff from the 
temp file which you specified e.g 2 seconds before the movement, the period 
of movement and 2 seconds afterwards. 
It is well worth downloading Motion and experimenting with it. Yes, it can 
create huge files if you save as mpegs and have lots of movement. That is 
partly why I use still images taken at 1 per second or whatever. I played 
with all the various settings over a week or two with the cam inside the 
house at first to get used to what it could do and what different options 
did. Once you get outside, there are more variables to possibly adjust - 
there is, for example, a way to ignore sudden light level changes, such as 
when the sun pops out (ok - that isn't a common feature this year!).
I personally feel Motion is one of the top Linux tools for people with webcams 
or security cameras - it is well worth a go, but it does take a bit of time 
to read the various settings and configure it to your own needs.

Mark

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