Motion-WebCam

This perl-script saves, in fixed intervals, pictures from a WebCam if there was motion detected in the picture.

The package mainly consists of:

• A Perl-script which connects to a server running CamServ. This does not necessarily have to be your own WebCam but might also be someone else's. But may I ask you to inform the webmaster of the respective WebCam in case you hook up to his server?
  The script makes use of the netpbm package to convert pictures, detect the motion, et al.
• A tiny little shell script which erases older pics in order to keep your harddisk clean. I believe you figure this yourself; it's here for completeness.
• A PHP-script in case you run your own web-server or have a good relation to the guy hosting your homepage. The script builds a web-page showing all the recorded frames on demand. (See below if you can't run PHP)

Oh, and not to forget: If you want a more accurate solution (consuming more CPU power and harddisk space), try motion. This is a really excellent package with which you'll for sure not miss one single frame. It can also create MPEGs out of what it detected. But be warned! It allocated 30% CPU of my PIII/1GHz if I tuned it to be accurate ;-)

I didn't put a documentation into the tarball yet. But here's some brief instructions on how to get it running: Get the gzipped tarball. Unpack it to a convenient location and:

• Edit MotionWebCam.pl. There's a section commented as "Settings" which you should inspect carefully.
  The CamServ Server provides a convenient way of grabbing a single frame through host:port/singleframe (see the $URL variable for details). The sensitivity which triggers a motion-detection can easily be debugged by enabling the respective print command in the source (see the source code comments). If enabled, the script will print Delta to the console every time a frame is grabbed. If Delta is smaller than the pre-set $SENSITIVITY, it's considered detected motion and a shot is taken.
  The path to where the pictures (containing detected motion) are saved can be anywhere as long as the access-rights are OK.
  Futher, you can set the interval in which a picture is grabbed and comapred against the previous one by tuning $FRAMEDELAY. A setting of 3 (3 seconds) here provides a quite easy CPU load...
• Run MotionWebCam.pl, e.g. in /etc/rc.d/rc.local or as a SYS V script. This is best done by the command /foo.../MotionWebCam &. Keep in mind that the script does NOT detach itself, so you need the & at the end!
  And, please! Consider well which user you want to run this script as...
• Once running, MotionWebCam will start filling your chosen path with pictures. To keep this directory within limits, there's a tiny little script included in the package which deletes all file that are older than a given time.
  Edit CleanShots.sh. More than only simple, just adjust the filepath variable to point to the path where your shots are located. Be careful not to specify the wrong path or important files might disappear forever ;). spawn defines, in the usual find syntax, the time after which pictures are deleted (see man find for details).
• Run this CleanShots.sh from cron at reasonable intervals. For RedHat, this can e.g. be done with the command ln -s /foo../CleanShots.sh /etc/cron.hourly/CleanShots.sh
• If you have your own web-server (including PHP support) running or your webpage hoster is generous enough, there's a PHP script included wich can, on demand, display the list of pictures taken. Edit list.php and set the variable $path to the path where your pictures are located. Put it on your server and off you go...
  If you don't have the chance to run PHP scripts, there's still another way: Write a small script which generates a HTML-file pointing to all your pictures. You can then, e.g. triggered by cron, upload all the pictures plus the generated page to your homepage. This works quite flawlessly with a tool like ncftpput and maybe something like dial-demandd, which can also be found on my page. (That's acually how I did it for quite some months before my praised ISP introduced flat-rate...).
• If you have any problems in getting it running, collect all the logs you can and drop me a mail. Promise, I'll try ;-)