Codec choices

Question

First off, let me say thank you. Motion is an excellent product and you can bet I'll be telling my friends about it. Now on to the questions:

Is there any way I can pass more specific recording formats/codecs to ffmpeg? For instance, is there any way to use xvid instead of mpeg1?

Also (somewhat related)

Is there some way to include audio with the video stream? The camera I'm using has a mic attached, which I've plugged into the server (strangely enough :)) using the mic input. I would love to be able to encode the audio inside the video file.

Thanks again

Environment

Motion version:	3.1.17
Libraries:	curl, ffmpeg
Server OS:	Debian custom 2.4.26

-- TWikiGuest - 24 Jan 2005

Answer

At the moment timelapse is always made with mpeg1.

Movement triggered films can be made with mpeg1, mpeg4 or msmpeg4. mpeg1 is only supported by ffmpeg-0.4.8. The ffmpeg guys decided to remove support for non-standard mpeg1 framerates for mpeg1 so with ffmpeg-0.4.9 Motion only supports mpeg4 and msmpeg4. But these are a better choice so it does not mean much.

To support more codecs the ffmpeg.c sources will have to extended. Nothing prevents this. But someone have to do it.

Sound:

Motion captures picture frames when motion is detected. It is greatly configurable with pre and post capture and the gap value. While a few frames of video is worth gold a few fractions of sound is worthless. It would be very hard to make useful sound in sync with the video.

You could trigger sound recording when motion is detected and record for a while.

The 'execute' option is ideal for starting an external program recording sound for a while. I do not intend to try and add sound to Motion.

-- KennethLavrsen - 24 Jan 2005