No longer able to record timelapse video

Question

I last built motion on Sat Aug 18 22:11:02 2012 against ffmpeg 0.10.3. It has been working fine ever since. Recently however I had to rebuild the thing due to the version change of ffmpeg libraries. This version breaks the timelapse feature. Recording video on motion events (in MPEG 4) works as it did in the past, but I am no longer able to record timelapse movies (in MPEG 1). Indeed, setting ffmpeg_timelapse to anything but zero causes the repeat error shown below.:

The offending file does not exist but the ownership for the respective directory (/home/motion/front/daily) is correct (motion:video); this directory has been created by motion itself some time earlier. I suspect that the EINPROGRESS error code is thrown by ffmpeg and is a red herring.

The recent rebuild of motion happened because of the change in ffmpeg library versions and broke things as described above. I tried this with ffmepg 1.0.7 (current Gentoo stable) as well as 0.10.7 (oldest available); the failure remains.

The relevant config options are shown below. I believe that other things are unrelated and/or at their default value (but I might be wrong, please let me know and I will post the entire config).

I asked this on Gentoo's fora and got another person with similar issues (though the error is EINVAL rather than EINPROGRESS); I am not sure whether these are related. I do not even know how to start debugging this so help on the matter is much appreciated. Many thanks!

Error report:

 [2] ffmpeg_open FPS 24 
 [2] ffmpeg_avcodec_log: intra_quant_bias = 96 inter_quant_bias = 0 
  - flag 48 
 [2] Error opening file /home/motion/side/daily/20130708.mpg: Operation now in progress 
 [1] ffmpeg_open FPS 24 
 [2] ffopen_open error creating (timelapse) file [/home/motion/side/daily/20130708.mpg]: Operation now in progress 
 [1] ffmpeg_avcodec_log: intra_quant_bias = 96 inter_quant_bias = 0 
  - flag 48 
 [1] Error opening file /home/motion/front/daily/20130708.mpg: Operation now in progress 
 [1] ffopen_open error creating (timelapse) file [/home/motion/front/daily/20130708.mpg]: Operation now in progress

Relevant configuration:

 ffmpeg_cap_new on 
 ffmpeg_timelapse 1
 ffmpeg_timelapse_mode daily
 ffmpeg_video_codec mpeg4
 width 640
 height 480

Environment

Motion version:	3.2.12
ffmpeg version:	1.0.7
Libraries:	ffmpeg
Server OS:	Gentoo amd64/13.0, kernel 3.8.13 w/ Gentoo patches

-- StefanBruda - 12 Jul 2013

Answer