Image File Output

output_motion

• Type: Boolean
• Range / Valid values: on, off
• Default: off
• Option Topic

Output pictures with only the moving object. This feature generates the special motion type movies where you only see the pixels that changes as a graytone image. If labelling is enabled you see the largest area in blue. Smartmask is shown in red.

Motion images shows the motion content of the pictures. This is good for tuning and testing but probably not very interesting for the general public.

Default is not to store motion images. Motion pictures are stored the same place and with the same filename as normal motion triggered pictures except they have an "m" appended at the end of the filename before the .jpg or .ppm. E.g. the name can be 01-20020424232936-00m.jpg.

output_normal

• Type: Discrete Strings
• Range / Valid values: on, off, first, best, center (since 3.2.10)
• Default: on
• Option Topic

Normal image is an image that is stored when motion is detected. It is the same image that was taken by the camera. I.e. not a motion image like defined by output_motion. Default is that normal images are stored.

If you set the value to 'first' Motion saves only the first motion detected picture per event.

If you set it to "best" Motion saves the picture with most changed pixels during the event. This is useful if you store mpegs on a webserver and want to present a jpeg to show the content of the mpeg on a webpage. "best" requires a little more CPU power and resources compared to "first".

Picture with motion nearest center of picture is saved when set to 'center' (since 3.2.10).

Set to 'off' to not write pictures (jpeg or ppm).

ppm

• Type: Boolean
• Range / Valid values: on, off
• Default: off
• Option Topic

Output ppm images instead of jpeg. This uses less CPU time, but causes a LOT of hard disk I/O, and it is generally slower than jpeg.

The recommendation is to always use jpg except if you have a specific need to store high quality pictures without any quality loss. For web cameras you should always choose jpg. Note that the built in webcam server requires that this parameter is set to off.

quality

• Type: Integer
• Range / Valid values: 1 - 100
• Default: 75
• Option Topic

The quality for the jpeg images in percent.

100 means hardly compressed. A small number means a much smaller file size but also a less nice quality image to look at. 50 is a good compromise for most.

-- KennethLavrsen - 11 Apr 2005