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Re: [LUG] Exeter Hospital Radio Fun Day

 

Quoting Mark Jose <kernowyon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> 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
>

Maybe I haven't set it up right, it certainly fills the hard drive on  
my machine.  I'm only using motion to grab a snap shot, add the  
date/time and a bit of text onto the image and then leave the image in  
another location for uploading via FTP.  Still it does that really  
well.  I've setup a cron job to prune the leftover files every hour so  
I'm not so bothered about it leaving a load of files lying around.  In  
fact it might be handy to keep copies of these files in the future (in  
case the presenters in the studio do anything funny).

I'd certainly say Motion is much better than something I tried a  
couple of years back which was some complicated motion capture app  
which had a complicated web interface to set it up (can't remember the  
name of it).

Rob




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