Motion Overview

What is Motion?

Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed. Or in other words, it can detect motion.

The program is written in C and is made for the Linux operating system.

Motion is a command line based tool. It has absolutely no graphical user interface. Everything is setup either via the command line or via a set of configuration files (simple ASCII files that can be edited by any ASCII editor).

The output from motion can be:

• jpg files
• ppm format files
• mpeg video sequences

How do I get Motion and what does it cost?

Motion is an open source type of project. It does not cost anything. Motion is published under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (GPL) version 2 or later. It may be a bit difficult to understand all the details of the license text (especially if your first language is not English). It means that you can get the program, install it and use it freely. You do not have to pay anything and you do not have to register anywhere or ask the author or publisher for permission. The GPL gives you both rights and some very reasonable duties when it comes to copying, distribution and modification of the program. So in very general terms you do not have to worry about licensing as a normal hobby user. If you want to use Motion in a commercial product, if you want to distribute either modified or original versions of Motion - for free or for a fee, you should read the license carefully. For more information about free software and the GPL, I encourage you to study the very interesting documents about the subject available the of the Free Software Foundation pages about the Philosophy of the GNU Project.

Maintenance and Support

Both Motion and the Motion Guide are written by people that do all this as a hobby and without asking for any payments or donations. We have a life other than developing Motion and its documentation. This means that bugfixes and updates to this guide are done as our time and families allow it. You are however encouraged to participate and contribute in a very active mailing list. It is a list with a very "positive attitude" and with many contributors that propose features, post patches, discuss problems and patiently answer newbie questions with a very positive spirit. Expect 1-10 emails per day.

To get motion direct your browser to the Motion Homepage.

On the Download Files page you will find a links to the latest stable version both as sources and binaries for some of the most popular Linux distributions. You will also find links to development versions. Snapshot releases are special test releases that are normally very stable. Every day a Motion Daily Source Snap is created from the Motion Subversion

Motion was originally written by Jeroen Vreeken who still actively participates in the development of Motion and later Folkert van Heusden continued as a lead programmer with Kenneth Lavrsen responsible for Motion Guide, website and releases on Sourceforge.

From version 3.1.12 Motion is now project managed entirely by Kenneth Lavrsen, and the project now shift towards being developed by many contributers.

For support we encourage you to join the mailing list instead of writing to Jeroen, Folkert or Kenneth directly. We are all very active on the mailing list and by using the mailing list much more users will have benefit of the answers. Newbies and stupid questions are welcome on the list. Contributions in the form of patches are also very welcome on the mailing list.

Which version to download and use?

Versions 3.2.X are the current version. There is at the moment no development branch. The versions 3.1.X ended at 3.1.20 and there will be no more 3.1.X releases. If you use use a version older than 3.2.X you are encouraged to update.

Since 3.1.13 quite many options have been renamed to make setting up Motion easier. From 3.1.17-18 some unfinished features have been removed. The Berkeley mpeg feature is now removed because the ffmpeg feature is now mature and much better working. At version 3.1.18 a new network camera feature was introduced replacing the old cURL based netcam code and introducing support of mjpeg streaming cameras. However this new code was quite difficult to get stable. During the development of 3.2.2 the network camera code was totally rewritten again learning from our experience and now finally it seems to be stable.

Motion is included in Debian, while Ubuntu and RPM users can find binary packages on the Motion Sourceforge file download page.

What features does Motion have?

See more description at the Motion Homepage.

• Taking snapshots of movement
• Watch multiple video devices at the same time
• Watch multiple inputs on one capture card at the same time
• Live streaming webcam (using multipart/x-mixed-replace)
• Real time creation of mpeg movies using libraries from ffmpeg
• Take automated snapshots on regular intervals
• Take automated snapshots at irregular intervals using cron
• Executing external program when detecting movement
• Execute external program at the beginning of an event of several motion detections.
• Execute external program at the end of an event of several motion detections.
• Execute external program when a picture is saved.
• Execute external program when a movie mpeg is created (opened)
• Execite external program when a movie mpeg ends (closed)
• Motion tracking
• Feed events to an MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
• Feed video back to a video4linux loopback for real time viewing
• Web interface using Motion Related Projects such as motion.cgi, Kenneths Webcam Package, Kevins Webpage, X-Motion and many more.
• User configurable and user defined on screen display.
• Control via simple web interface.
• Automatic noise and threshold control
• Ability to control the pan/tilt of a Logitech Sphere (or Orbit) camera
• Highly configurable display of text on images.
• High configurable definition of path and file names of the stored images and films.

You can find more information and links at the Motion Homepage.

FreeBSD

Motion is originally developed for Linux and it is still mainly developed and supported for this platform. From version 3.1.15 an experimental port has been made by Angel Carpintero. Not all features of Motion are supported at this time and it still needs a lot of test time on different hardware. Angel is very interested in feedback. Join the Motion Mailing List and give your feedback there. Patches for bugfixes and for enabling the missing features are very welcome. The rest of this guide is still mainly targeted for Linux users. Follow this topic to Install FreeBSD.

MacOSX

From Motion version 3.2.4 it is now also possible to build and install Motion under MacOSX. Feature set it the same as for FreeBSD. See the MacOSX topic for specific help how to install Motion and its dependencies on MacOSX. Again this port has been contributed by Angel Carpintero.

Documentation

You have the following sources of information:

• This Motion Guide.
• The Frequently Asked Questions
• The author of the program has written a description of the technology behind motion.
• The man page. After installation simply write man motion
• The default motion.conf file (motion-dist.conf) that comes with the package.

Supported Hardware

Input devices: Here we are thinking about the cameras.

Motion supports video input from two kinds of sources.

Standard video4linux devices (e.g. /dev/video0). Motion has no drivers for cameras. Installing the camera itself is outside the scope of this document. But here are some nice links.

• Driver for USB Philips cameras (and more) This driver is a fork of the old pcw(x) driver which got kicked out of the kernel. (see: http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/). See also the new PWC Documentation Site which is hosted in this wiki.
• BTTV Driver (capture cards). Part of many distributions now.
• OV511 based USB cameras are supported as standard by newer Kernels.
• kernel driver for USB cameras based on Sunplus spca50
• rivatv.sourceforge.net Driver for tv/composite/svideo input with most Nvidia based video cards. Network cameras (which are actually cameras with a built in web server that can be connected directory to your network).
• Axis Communications

-- KennethLavrsen - 13 Dec 2005