So, there is a fair amount of information floating around the web on this, and I’ve hit on a couple of wrinkles which are worth sharing.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned in my previous post, I had got the motion package up and running very quickly with my old EyeToy camera. As the picture quality was pretty awful, I ordered up an HP HD-2200, which arrived this morning. The over-riding principles for picking this camera are that it is supported<\/a> [obviously!] and that it doesn’t need any external power.<\/p>\n This produced images straight away too, but when I ran it on the \u00a0width and height parameters in the motion configuration<\/a>\u00a0that I’d been using for the EyeToy [640 x 480], I was getting what looked like a scanning line at the bottom of the image and the motion software seemed to go into a loop [based on my horrible hacky configuration – more on this in a moment].<\/p>\n The motion documentation indicated that this was probably an issue with the chosen resolution, so I started to chop and change it. This was the start of a couple of hours [EDIT: make that half a day!] of messing with various resolution settings, and researching the problem. The camera documentation refers you to the functionality of a Windows binary for adjusting this and, because I’m running on a Mac, this wasn’t an option. I found a list of width \/ height settings on a random shopping site selling the camera, and I went through all of them – I won’t link to it as none of them worked.<\/p>\n I tried doubling the default resolution [still divisible by 16, as required by the motion software] and… This is inconclusive. It worked, then I changed the settings, and changed them back to 704 x 576, and it stopped working again. Continuing to mess with the settings caused the kernel to crash at one point. I also wasn’t seeing anything particularly helpful in \/var\/log\/messages – it just seemed to be a copy of standard out – i.e., what’s logged to the screen when you see when you start the motion from the command line.<\/p>\n I did another reboot [a little more graceful this time] with the camera unplugged, reverted to 704 x 576, and it’s now working again, but I’m not convinced about the stability.<\/p>\n One other quick point: there is a fair amount of documentation which refers to the motion configuration option on_event_start, which gives example setting for gMail. While I’m using some of the advanced authentication options for Google [being a security bore], I couldn’t get this to work – I kept getting an SSL error. The example I saw every time was of an email indicating that a file had been uploaded to an FTP server [which I also played with].<\/p>\n I wanted to send the file via email. So I came up with another solution, which unfortunately won’t suit everyone’s needs as I created my own mail account on one of the domains I own. So I’ve created a sacrificial account for the sending of non-SSL emails [for now]. The incantation I’ve used to email the file is:<\/p>\n on_picture_save sendEmail -f myacc@mydomain.com -t myacc@mydomain.com\u00a0-u “movement” -m “I’m at it again” -s smtp.mydomain.com -xu myacc@mydomain.com -xp my password -o tls=no -a %f.<\/p>\n So your mileage may vary here, assuming that your smtp server requires authentication [which it should], and that it is also happy to not speak TLS [which it may not]. So the -a %f is what adds the image file as an attachment.<\/p>\n This also uses sendEmail, which is a \u00a0Perl wrapper to sendmail, as it’s a bit easier to use from the command line.<\/p>\n EDIT:\u00a0I’m coming to the conclusion that the HD-2200 won’t support a resolution higher than the default [352 x 288] the motion package. A more careful look at the logs, after yet another unexplained end to motion loading with my config, showed that it was resetting the resolution to 800 x 600. This is unsupported, as 600 will throw a modulo 16 error if you try to start with this width. That, at least, is reasonably consistent.<\/p>\n I found a thread on a bulletin board in relation to another error I was seeing [Config palette index 8 (YU12) doesn’t work], and which required the install of a library,\u00a0libv4l-0. I duly installed this, and made the error go away, but still no joy with upping the resolution.<\/p>\n Oh well, if the images being produced are smaller than on my old EyeToy, at least they are a darn sight clearer.<\/p>\n [Final update on this]. I’ve been working on this for about 6 hours now, and am about to leave the field of play. I’ve tried doing some changes to the palette setting, based on running motion in setup mode [the -s flag on the command line]. If you do this at a resolution higher than the default but with the default setting for v4l2_palette [8]\u00a0you see the following:<\/p>\n [1] Config palette index 8 (YU12) doesn’t work. I’ve had a play around with the corresponding flags for these [2 and 6], and they both have problems at 640 x 480. My conclusion is that 352 x 288 is as high as a resolution as usable with the motion package. AKA I’m conceding defeat!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, there is a fair amount of information floating around the web on this, and I’ve hit on a couple of wrinkles which are worth sharing. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had got the motion package up … Continue reading
\n[1] Supported palettes:
\n[1] 0: YUYV (YUV 4:2:2 (YUYV))
\n[1] 1: MJPG (MJPEG)<\/p>\n