Known Problems

See also the Frequently Asked Questions and Bug Reports for known open bugs.

Kernel 2.6 and pwc. Note that for kernel 2.6 there is a new release of the Philips WebCam (pwc) drivers 10.0.X. It is recommended to install this. At the time of this being written the 2.6.12+ kernels have a version of pwc built-in but it is a cripled version which can only support very small picture size. You can however download the latest source code of the pwc driver (at this time 10.0.11) and build it without having to rebuild your kernel. But you will need to have either the kernel sources or a special kernel-header package installed to compile it. See Installation of PWC page which is also hosted in this wiki.

If you use use a Logitech Quickcam Orbit or Sphere using the driver pwc/pwcx and kernel 2.6.X you should replace the file in the Motion sources called pwc-ioctl.h with the one that comes with the your pwc version. Motion is shipped with 3 versions of pwc-ioctl.h-VERSION. Rename the one that fits your major pwc version number best to pwc-ioctl.h (after renaming the current to something else). There has been some small adjustments in the API that requires that you have the right header file.

Camera picture dimensions must be multiple of 16 Dimentions of camera image must have both height and width that are a multiple of 16. Thís is normally not a problem. All standard sizes like 640, 480, 352, 320, 288, 240, ...etc are multiples of 16. But if you intend to monitor a network camera which is saving jpeg images you may have to pay attention to the dimensions of the picture.

ffmpeg_filename has changed name to movie_filename The 3.2.5 release contains a motion_guide and man page in which it was forgotten to change ffmpeg_filename to movie_filename. Please note that the option that defines the filenames for mpeg movies is now called movie_filename. This change is made because we may soon implement alternatives to ffmpeg and then ffmpeg_filename will be a bad name. This is fixed in release 3.2.5.1.

error: `time_current_frame' undeclared (first use in this function) A bug in 3.2.5 and 3.2.5.1 where a bugfix related to snapshot feature has created a new bug when you compile Motion without ffmpeg libs installed. This is fixed in 3.2.6.

-- KennethLavrsen - 12 Dec 2005