!Need Help With Security!

[thelonegunmen]

I recently got robbed, so I bought some cheap webcams on amazon and what I want to do is use them to survey the perimeter. I am going to hook up some motion sensors to floodlights and I want my webcams to start recording only when significant motion (such as a person moving) is detected. Are there any good programs out there that will help me do this?

Thanks,
-Jimmy

[GreyGeek]

Re: !Need Help With Security!

V4L capture program supporting motion detection
Open a konsole and issue:
sudo apt-get install motion

Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed. Or in other words, it can detect motion.

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.

The output from motion can be:
- jpg files
- ppm format files
- mpeg video sequences

Also, motion has its own minimalistic web server. Thus, you can access the webcam output from motion via a browser.

Read this. The script it talks about is this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use File::Basename;

sub delete_recent {
	$d = $_[0];
	$mintime = $_[1];

	$d =~ s/\/$//;	# Remove trailing slash (if present)
	$current_time = time;
	
	foreach $file (<$d/*>) {
		$mtime = ( stat $file )[9];
		$diff = $current_time - $mtime;
		
		if ($diff < $mintime) {
			unlink($file);
		}
	}
}

sub monitor {
	$wait_before = $_[0];
	$wait_after = $_[1];
	
	my $cmd = "dbus-monitor --session \"type='signal',interface='org.gnome.ScreenSaver',member='ActiveChanged'\"";
	open (IN, "$cmd |");
	while (<IN>) {
		if (m/^\s+boolean true/) {
			# SESSION IDLE
			sleep($wait_before);
			system("motion &");

		} elsif (m/^\s+boolean false/) {
			# SESSION NO LONGER IDLE
			system("killall motion");
			sleep 1;		# Wait for motion to shut down.
			delete_recent("/tmp/motion",$wait_after+1);
		}
	}
}

# Start monitoring when screensaver is active
# Parameter 1: Wait x seconds before turning on the camera
# Parameter 2: Dump files made y seconds prior to unlocking the screensaver
monitor(30,30);

The author of "motion" wrote some useful tips and techniques: http://www.chriswpage.com/2009/05/se...04-and-motion/