Motion Snapshot Release 3.1.18_snap11

Note - The formal release 3.1.18 is now available. You should not need to download this snap shot release. The formal 3.1.18 is better with a few more bugs fixed.

Release Notes

3.1.18 snap11 - 23 Jan 2005

Development Release - not recommended for normal use

We are very interested in getting 3.1.18_snap11 tested by people with Netcams. We are also interested in hearing if framerates are improved during Motion detection.

People that had problems with zombies or had problems with warnings about signal(SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN) in the syslog should test snap11 and report if there are still any problems with either zombie processes or syslog warnings.

Changes since 3.1.17

snap1

• Removed the Berkeley mpeg feature (code commented out)
• Implemented a bugfixed version of
  http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/BrightnessContrastPatch

snap2

• Improved the Makefile with automatic check of dependencies and nicer output for the user.
  http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/MakefileWithAutoDependencies
• Implenmented first phase of the rotate patch. Need to fix the storage method for image height and width. PerJonsson is working on a phase 2 of the patch to ensure that changing height and width via xmlrpc is not changing the current width/height as this screws up a lot of malloc'ed memory.
  http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/RotatePatch

snap3

• Implemented phase 2 of the rotate patch
• Added brightness patch options to motion-dist.conf

snap4

• Added the new smart mask feature. It is working but it is still under development. It currently outputs an extra smart mask timelapse movie when the normal timelapse is enabled. This will be removed in the final version. http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/PatchSmartMask
• Added a new config option --without-optimizecpu which disables the CPU specific compiler optimizations introduced with the rotate phase 2 patch. The purpose of the new option is to enable a packager to build an RPM or deb package which is not tied to a specific CPU type.
• Man page updated with the new brightness and smart mask options.
• Configure help texts improved.
• Added the pwc-10.0.5 version of pwc-ioctl.h.
• Changing rotate, height and width via xmlrpc no longer affects the running program. The user can change the options and write them to the config files and then restart motion. This change is done because many internal data structures and memory allocations cannot handle change of image dimentions/size.
• Fixed the problem with leading spaces of text_left and text_right getting lost when saving with xmlrpc. For text_left and text_right Motion now puts the string in quotation marks if the value starts with a leading space. http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/BugReport2004x10x24x135840

snap5

• Merged in the November 10th update of smartmask.
• Started working on fixing the signed vs unsigned issue related to handling of images. The snap5 is created to get the developers in sync.

snap6

• Merged in the DilateNineSpeedPatch
  http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/DilateNineSpeedPatch
• Changed a few image char definitions to unsigned char. Still many to fix.

snap7

• Implemented the 15-Nov-2004 Smartmask patch which removed the smartmask debugging timelapse code and instead adds the smartmask info to the motion images and jpegs as red areas. Normal motion is shown in black and white (greytones). This concludes Joerg Webers smartmask feature. The patch is now in ReleasedSnapshot state for 3.1.18.
• Implemented Angel Carpintero's FreeBSD auto-detection CPU/ARCH fix.
• Merged in Per Johnsson's DilateFiveSpeedPatch. http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/DilateFiveSpeedPatch
• Removed the prediction feature from the code (commented out for now). This was done because feature was never completed, noone showed real interest to finish it and there was an almost silent acceptance when it was proposed on the Motion Mailing List.
• Included fix by Jan X. http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/BugReport2004x11x13x202132

snap8

• Implemented an improvement of Smartmask so that the mask is cleared when the smart_mask_speed is set from a non-zero to zero (by Joerg Weber)
• Implemented an improvement of noise_tune with smart mask (and probably also in general) (by Joerg Weber)
• Improved the picture control function so that cameras are only probed when needed to avoid USB errors. (Kenneth Lavrsen)
• Implemented new ffmpeg patch (Per Jönsson) http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/FfmpegPatch049
• Implemented new preview patch (Joerg Weber) http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/PreviewShotsPatch
• Removed commented code from obsolete Berkeley and Prediction features
• Implemented labelling speed patch (Per Jönsson) http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/LabelingSpeedPatch

snap9

• Implemented Streaming Netcam Without Curl which enables connecting to network cameras both with single jpeg frame mode and streaming mjpeg mode. This enables much higher framerates with Netcams (by Christopher Price and Angel Carpintero). http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/StreamingNetcamWithoutCurl
• Implemented a significant speed improvement in the motion detection algoritm (by Per Jönsson). http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/AlgDiffStandardMmxPatch
• Fixed a small bug which caused in jumpy mpeg1 videos with ffmpeg 0.4.8.

snap10

• Corrected a small error in the usage help text http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/BugReport2005x01x05x174139
• Improved the help text for config option night_compensate in docs, conf.c, motion man pages and config file. http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/BugReport2005x01x06x103939
• Improved the Netcam patch (Angel Carpintero) http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/StreamingNetcamWithoutCurl (pre2 patch fixes problem with not detecting Content-length and segfaults in netcam)
• Improved the signal handling of ctrl-C as suggested by Per Jonsson http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/BugReport2005x01x06x181426
• Implemented a POSIX compliant SIGCHLD signal handler as replacement for the traditional signal(SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN) which can cause floods of warnings in some RedHat versions. (Angel Carpintero and Kenneth Lavrsen) http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/BugReport2004x10x26x134906
• Changed the reporting of the changes of noise detection level so that it is only displayed in the console (daemon off) when the always_changes option is enabled. (Kenneth Lavrsen)
• Changed the ffmpeg>0.4.8 = no mpeg1 gcc warning message so that it is clear to people that it is information and not an error message.

snap11

• Changed allocation of despeckle buffer to avoid a seg fault when using a netcam where the image is wider than defined in motion.conf width.
• The noise tune value displayed in the upper left corner along with number of changed pixels is no longer displayed (was there for debugging).
• Improved the Netcam patch (Angel Carpintero) http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/pub/Motion/StreamingNetcamWithoutCurl/ pre3 reconnection feature added)
• Changed the SIGCHLD handler introduced in snap10 so that it is a shorter and faster function. Disabled this handler in the xmlrpc thread as this caused unnecessary loops of cpu cycles. Additionally made the code in xmlrpc more correct and robust (handling of select()) (Kenneth Lavrsen)
• Fixed a bug in the timelapse feature. Both the rollover events of the timelapse video and timelapse shots could be missed if the CPU load was very high or the time was changes by ntp. Motion will now catch up a few seconds later if this happens. Also fixed the code for monthly rollover (Kenneth Lavrsen). http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/BugReport2005x01x23x133554

Next Steps

• Testing for stability
• Bugfix patches welcome
• There is now Feature Freeze on 3.1.X - New features will be deferred to 3.2.1.
• Targetting 3.1.18 release January 2005.

Known Problems

• Motion Guide not yet updated - will wait until more patches are applied.

• The pwc-ioctl.h is for pwc version 9.0.1 and 10.0.6. If you still use the pwc 8 series then you need to use the headerfile pwc-ioctl.h-pwc8.0 (copy the pwc-ioctl.h-pwc8.0 over pwc-ioctl.h). This is relevant for USB cameras using Philips chips.

Download

• motion-3.1.18_snap11.tar.gz

Note - The formal release 3.1.18 is now available. You should not need to download this snap shot release. The formal 3.1.18 is better with a few more bugs fixed.

-- KennethLavrsen - 23 Jan 2005

Bug Reports

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