What really matters? The card or the camera?

Question

All I read on motion is about specific cameras.

Our voluntary worker's organization got a deal on a wireless generic surveillance camera!

Does it really matter what kind of camera we use? Right now I use a TV capture card ATI TV Wonder pro and I can get the radio of the receptor to feed images to xawtv, tvtime via that ATI card... but with all possible settings of «input» parameter, I can't get MOTION to catch images from it (even with output_all on). The program loads by nothing happens, no images saved, no execution of the execute option... The card works but is not officially supported by V4L.

May I assume that replacing my video capture card by a model more supported by V4L will allow us to use motion? no matter what camera feeds the card?

I would like to use motion because it is more simple (using an old computer to run it) than zoneminder with which I experience bugs after bugs with ffmpeg, apache... and I'd like to have a working surveillance system this year (2004).

Environment

Motion version:	3.1.17
Libraries:	curl (debian testing), xmlrpc (debian testing), ffmpeg (basic install, no way to get libvorbis0 to live together with other updates, tried compilation et .deb), mysql (debian testing), postgresql (not installed)
Server OS:	Debian 3.0r3, but with kernel 2.6.9

-- MartinLevac - 11 Dec 2004

Answer

If you have a V4L compatible capture card or TV card you can connect any composite video camera to it.

The camera itself and its optics has great impact on video quality naturally but Linux will not know the difference. It only sees the capture card.

-- KennethLavrsen - 14 Dec 2004