Motion Usage

[leanne63]

I'm also on GitLab, @AntiSol , so looking forward to your fork over there.

I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 with a Logitech Brio 100 USB camera. I've got it successfully taking pictures with fswebcam (VSL2?). Just not sure where to go from there to make it a motion-detect security camera.

I do also want to add some cameras in the future. I had picked up a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero2W boards and Camera Module 3 NoIR Wide modules. They're still in their packaging as I'm not sure how to move forward.

Note: I do have a tech support background, along with my dev experience, so I'm not afraid of doing things with hardware, but... I have a psych block on some new things, and this is one of them. I'm just stuck and need a little hand-holding to get started with this. Sigh... so frustrating to have people like Mr D. How difficult would it be for him to just leave Motion as it was, in its own repo, and leave MotionPlus separate. He could've just moved his support to the MotionPlus repo rather than overwriting the Motion repo that is in so many beginner instruction sets for security cameras? Argh. Preaching to the choir, I know.

[AntiSol]

hey @leanne63

yes, I know, it's always unfortunate when a maintainer develops such hostility. Luckily one of the benefits of free software is that I can just fork and call him out for being a dick and there's nothing he can do about that.

ok so as I'm sure you're aware, things are "in flux" at the moment.

Motioneye and motioneyeos are really great. I use them for a bunch of cameras. However motioneyeos hasn't been updated for either python 3 or the raspberry pi 4, so it's a bit out of date. It does still work just fine on e.g a raspberry pi 3, however. And in my opinion if you've got the right hardware it's still a very good/easy option.

Given that you say you're on a raspberry pi 4, I think probably the best option for you would be this:

1. install official raspberry pi debian 12 image on your pi, as per the standard instructions
2. follow the instructions in the motioneye project's readme for installing here. This will install the current version of motioneye that works with python 3.
3. once that's done, you should be able to access the motioneye interface at http://your-raspberry-pi-ip:9081. From there you can configure your camera via the web interface - motioneye takes care of configuring and starting motion for you
4. you're in luck, a usb webcam is easier to set up and more compatible than the pi cameras. So do that one first and get a feel for installing it before you worry about the pi cameras
5. I read somewhere that Mr Dick has changed the directory where config files live in one of the more recent versions of motion, from /etc/motion to /var/lib/motion. Because hey, what's wrong with breaking compatibility with existing installs on a minor version "upgrade"? it would take like 5 lines of code and like 15 minutes to write the code to scan both locations and use the first one you find. Mr Dick has got better things to do, like make his shiny thing work with AI. I have not run into this issue yet because the cameras I'm using are on motion 4.5.1. But if you're using a newer version you might need to look in the new location for motion config (hopefully not, i think motioneye should take care of all of that for you)

WRT the pi cameras, the situation is this:

• Raspberry pi switched from the old MMAL cameras (supported directly by motion) to using this new library called libcamera (not supported by motion) because ooh shiny
• For this reason I strongly recommend just working with the usb webcam at first until you've got a working motioneye setup, and only then starting to set up the pi cameras with motioneye.
• but when you do get to that point, it is possible: the libcamera people provide a tool called libcamerify which you can use to run software to make this libcamera library compatible with video4linux. Using that, it's possible to get motion and motioneye to work with these newer cameras (I have a couple of devices set up like this)
• there are instructions out there for adding libcamerify to the systemd unit file which starts motioneye. I'm sure I can find them if you get to that point. Or maybe you can. Try searching the motioneye issue tracker for 'libcamerify'. Or just reply here when you get to that point.
• Once that's done, you can just add your pi camera to motioneye as if it was a regular video4linux camera, just like a usb webcam.

OR, as an alternative to that, so I hear, Mr Dick's shiny motionplus garbage thing supports libcamera. So you might consider trying that. Maybe. Personally I wouldn't, because motioneye will almost certainly not support that, and the chance of the motionplus web interface being better than motioneye is about 0.0000000001%. I can't give you any advice on that because I have no experience with or interest in motionplus. But I should at least let you know the option exists :)

I've never worked with the pi zero so unfortunately I can't give you much specific advice with those, but I suspect the process for installing motioneye will be pretty similar to what I've outlined above, assuming the linux distro is the same (I think it is)

I hope this helps! Please let me know how you go and if/where you get stuck or have any questions :)