# Anybody using motion with IP Cams?



## Phishfry (Nov 11, 2018)

This post is concerning multimedia/motion. An open source motion detection and recording program.
My BlueCherry on Linux APU2 computer croaked so I am rebuilding my Digital Security System.
First I tried Zoneminder again and my experience was actually worse this time, So I tried ZM on Devuan.
Fail there too. It works but not to my expectations.

So began searching for alternatives. I found a cool project called motioneye.
This is a gui for motion which provides a window for each camera.
That was all I needed. Problem is no port on FreeBSD. So I started puttering around with it and PIP.

Well motioneye has a wiki to setup on "other" OS's. Luckily it was close to what I needed.
In setting up for motioneye I did not have very good instructions for configuration.
So I had to learn how to configure the motion configuration file motion.conf.
It is very well commented and motions documentation is excellent.
https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion

So I started with a security cam with no login needed as they are the easiest.
I added my cameras path and some other settings to motion.conf and went outside to clean the gutters in a motion capture test.

All I can say is WOW. It caught everything it was supposed to. The motion algorithms are working well.
It caught squirrels and humans, but not shadows and branches swaying.

I am so impressed that I am added 3 more cameras tonight to see how it does with a load.

Now that I have it running I started to tweak it as I don't need jpegs just movies of the capture.
I noticed that some settings in the Wiki were not present in motion.conf.
Then I looked at the version. FreeBSD's version is two years old and many versions behind.

So I might consider trying to upgrade this UNMAINTAINED port. Is anybody out there using it?
It seems to even work on the RaspberryPi too.

My thoughts are take this port over and try to port motioneye as well. Anybody need a simple GUI for motion?
https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneye/wiki


----------



## Phishfry (Nov 11, 2018)

I didn't get to motioneye yet so I did this for multimedia/motion testing.
I installed Xorg on the machine and use xfe and mpv to browse video files remotely.
Surprisingly, despite several ominous errors, mpv worked well over SSH X11-forwarding.

```
Playing: /03-20181110210014.avi
[ffmpeg/video] mpeg4: Failed to parse extradata
(+) Video --vid=1 (mpeg4 1280x1024 1000.000fps)
[vo/gpu/opengl] GLX not found.
[vo/gpu/opengl] Suspected software renderer or indirect context.
[vo/gpu/opengl] GLX not found.
Failed to open VDPAU backend Shared object "libvdpau_nvidia.so" not found, required by "mpv"
[vo/vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1
Xlib:  extension "XVideo" missing on display "localhost:10.0".
[vo/xv] Xv not supported by this X11 version/driver
[vaapi] libva: va_getDriverName() failed with unknown libva error,driver_name=(null)
[vaapi] Failed to initialize VAAPI: unknown libva error
[vo/x11] Warning: this legacy VO has bad performance. Consider fixing your graphics drivers, or not forcing the x11 VO.
VO: [x11] 1280x1024 yuv420p
[vo/x11] Shared memory not supported
[vo/x11] Reverting to normal Xlib
[vo/x11] Shared memory not supported
[vo/x11] Reverting to normal Xlib
[vo/x11] Shared memory not supported
[vo/x11] Reverting to normal Xlib
[vo/x11] Shared memory not supported
[vo/x11] Reverting to normal Xlib
V: 00:00:12 / 00:00:13 (96%)
Exiting... (End of file)
```


----------



## leebrown66 (Oct 11, 2019)

Reviving this, yes I am using it.  

Like you I suspect, I went the rounds of ZoneMinder on FreeBSD, not impressed, thought about switching to Linux, but came across this instead.  Installed multimedia/motion and was getting emails and generating stills/movies when motion was detected, within minutes.

And the best part is 5% CPU for motion, vs. 50% for ZoneMinder (for one IP camera)


----------



## Phishfry (Oct 11, 2019)

The best part about using motion is I don't have to constantly tweak it. The motion algorithms work very well.

I do feel bad about not grabbing port maintainership yet.
Unfortunatly I do feel that my programming skills are not up to par and I would hate to fail.


----------

