Motion – webcam software

Motion is a V4L capture program supporting motion detection. Set it up to monitor security cameras, watch birds, check in on your pet, create time-lapse videos and more.

In other words, this software monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed.

Motion is a command line based tool. It has no graphical user interface. Everything is setup either via the command line or via configuration files.

Features include:

• Use with the following devices:
  • V4l2 Webcams;
  • Video capture cards;
  • Network cameras via HTTP, RTSP and RTMP;
  • Static files via a v4l2 loopback device;
  • PI cameras.
• Output from motion:
  • JPEG files;
  • PPM format files;
  • MPEG video sequences.
• Access the webcam output from motion via a browser.
• Taking snapshots of movement.
• Watch multiple video devices at the same time.
• Watch multiple inputs on one capture card at the same time.
• Live streaming webcam (using multipart/x-mixed-replace).
• Real time creation of mpeg movies using libraries from ffmpeg.
• Take automated snapshots on regular intervals.
• Take automated snapshots at irregular intervals using cron.
• Executing external program when detecting movement.
• Execute external program at the beginning of an event of several motion detections.
• Execute external program at the end of an event of several motion detections.
• Execute external program when a picture is saved.
• Execute external program when a movie mpeg is created (opened).
• Execute external program when a movie mpeg ends (closed).
• Motion tracking.
• Feed events to an MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
• Feed video back to a video4linux loopback for real time viewing.
• Web interface using Motion Related Projects such as motion.cgi, Kenneths Webcam Package, Kevins Webpage, X-Motion, and many more.
• Has its own minimalistic web server.
• User configurable and user defined on screen display.
• Control via simple web interface.
• Automatic noise and threshold control.
• Ability to control the pan/tilt of a Logitech Sphere (or Orbit) camera.
• Highly configurable display of text on images.
• High configurable definition of path and file names of the stored images and films.

Website: motion-project.github.io
Support: Documentation, Mailing List, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Mr-Dave (previously Kenneth Lavrsen) and many contributors
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

Motion is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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