When you've got a new hammer the world often seems full of nails.

I like that
Mike

Hi,

After the ideas from the other evening, I decided to follow through with the suggestion from Liv2Cod. Now I have a place to store my hammered nails

Since my drive has already several partitions because I can and do have several versions of KM available. I used one 5 gig partition for this experiment. R5Bx was and is now expired. Here is the road I went, ymmv if you choose also play or build from scratch, maybe resize using ubuntu, etc. Nice part is that by simply deleting everything in that partition, it is still formated and in smaller blocks.


Using a spare partition... that had R5Bx installed

mount /mnt/hda6
rm -rf /mnt/hda6/*
rm -rf /mnt/hda6/.qt
mkdir /mnt/hda6/music
mkdir /mnt/hda6/gallery
mkdir /mnt/hda6/motion
mkdir /myth/store
chown mythtv:mythtv /myth/store
umount /mnt/hda6
nano /etc/fstab
was:
/dev/hda6 /mnt/hda6 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
now:
/dev/hda6 /myth/store ext3 auto,users,exec 0 0
save & exit
mount /myth/store
chown mythtv:mythtv /myth/store/*
ls /myth/store
gallery
motion
music

Now I can save small files more efficently and if motion fills the folder, no
errors to the system If you plan to store a lot of tunes, go for a partition size ~12 ~15 gig maybe more. I don't have a lot of music but still managed to come up with several gigs.

End result:
/dev/hda5 4.6G 4.1G 268M 95% /
/dev/hda8 79G 65G 14G 83% /myth (inodes 20064)
/dev/hda3 9.2G 3.4G 5.4G 39% /edubuntu
/dev/hda6 4.6G 33M 4.4G 1% /myth/store (inodes 611648)

nano /etc/motion/motion.conf
target_dir /myth/store/motion

R5C7
ln -s /myth/store/motion /myth/gallery
chown mythtv:mythtv /myth/gallery/motion

R5D1
rm /myth/gallery/motion
ln -s /myth/store/motion /myth/gallery
chown mythtv:mythtv /myth/gallery/motion

always run motion as user mythtv
tjc's code, slightly modified (works great, takes awhile:) )
killall motion #stops motion daemon
for i in $(find /myth/store/motion/ -type f -print | sort -r | sed '1,10d') ; do
rm -rf $i
done
motion #restarts motion daemon

Only thing missing is an hourly watchdog to check on motion space remaining to automaticly trigger "housekeeping" tjc?

Be sure to check all the details at http://www.lavrsen.dk/
Hope this may help and not confuse, Enjoy
Mike

Edit 13Oct to fix store / spare terminology error

Excellent! You've got it all working, then.

Reading through the steps, I'm guessing that /myth/store/... and /myth/spare/... are the same path? Prolly just a copy-paste thing.

Good work. One of these days I want to set up my camera and get motion going.

Joe

_________________
Do you code to live, or live to code?
Search LinHES forum through Google

Hi Liv2Cod,

Thanks for the catch, I must have jumped a cog or two going up the hill. Updated that part, Only thing different would be the partition # if one were to duplicate the steps.

As a side note I did all those steps on this machine (08:04:09 up 70 days) as I went along down to where I picked up D1. I am running R5 Cool 7. If you can see pictures in the phone window, you should be able to run motion.

Thanks again and have a great day!
Mike

Wow. This is great. I had sort of gotten motion to work, played with waving at the camera so far but not much more. With all these updates it can really get useful for me.
Begin Shameless Plug=>
The other thing is I got a cheap used security camera from my brother's online store at www.diysecurityworld.com. I got a black and white version of the little dome camera. He's got lots of good cable options. He made a integrated custom cable with power, video, and the RCA jack I needed, in the length I needed with no problem.
Thanks

_________________
free range geek in boulder, co and mythtv enthusiast
R6.03

Hi,

Glad some of the info is useful.

I am still investigating some of the extra features of motion, auto mask, sample rates verse strorage, etc. Learned a new trick yesterday as a matter of fact, When I clicked on the Motion label of the KM home page it fires off java and brings up the camera I have mine set as localhost currently and have mozilla (apt-get install mozilla) works slick.

Speaking of web pages, your brothers web site is not friendly to mozilla.

If you learn any tricks, share them
Mike

Hi, my action buttons aren't doing anything. In /var/www/motion/index.html I have so far. I click on the buttons and there's no change in ps ax. The EXEC stuff doesn't seem to go. I can start and stop motion from the shell as the mythtv user with no problems.
Also, would the advanced version of the cleanup button look like this:

_________________
free range geek in boulder, co and mythtv enthusiast
R6.03

Hi,

If things are not right with motion.config, motion will not run. Make sure it works before you jump up and down saying the scripts or menu doesn't work. Do an alt x for an xterm and follow the colors.

At the mythtv prompt ($) enter the command:
$ motion
then do
$ ps ax
and if motion is running you will see a pid number for a line with motion. If there is not a pid for motion, then it is not running and you need to tweak the file /etc/motion/motion.conf as user root.

For the cleanup,

While you have the xterm open, make a script using tjc's excellant simple little piece of code. Copy and paste the green into your new file, ctl x y and enter to exit and save.

Just be sure you change the path of where your files are stored as set up in the motion.config.
$ nano motion-cleanup
#<code>
#!/bin/sh
#
#Thanks to tjc for the code
killall motion #stops motion daemon
for i in $(find /myth/store/motion/ -type f -print | sort -r | sed '1,10d') ; do
rm -rf $i
done
motion #restarts motion daemon
#<end code>

Not sure what your buttons in the html will do, most likely nothing... as you indicated.

while you have the xterm open, run nano again and make a new motion.xml
$ nano .mythtv/motion.xml

<mythmenu name="MOTION">

<button>
<type>Start Motion</type>
<text>Start Motion</text>
<action>EXEC motion</action>
</button>

<button>
<type>Stop Motion</type>
<text>Stop Motion</text>
<action>EXEC killall motion</action>
</button>

<button>
<type>Clear Motion</type>
<text>Clear - Restart Motion</text>
<action>EXEC sh /home/mythtv/motion-cleanup </action>
</button>

</mythmenu>

Nothing more, nothing less and after you restart the frontend your new xml file should the one used by the system. Any menu xml file that is located in the .mythtv folder will be the one used. It is also preserved with a backup..

I think I flogged that area fairly well however if there is anything I may be able to add ask away.

A couple of little tid-bits that I have not chased is
IF you have a tuner card, ie x50 you will have to put in a patch to use the mpg stream.
IF you have a tuner card, and plug in a usb cam, the camera will not be /dev/video0, but /dev/video1
IF you have a usb cam plugged in and reboot, it WILL be /dev/video0 which means that IF you had a working tuner card, it will not work now as it will be /dev/video1 ?

I don't know how to lock some of those settings so at least now you have an idea of what happens.

The box I was learning on is currently doing what motion is suppose to do, watch for motion as we had some kids starting their pranks early. So far I have caught 2 rabbits and several moths. I am using a simple single old bttv tv card, and you don't even set it up as it defaults to /dev/video0.

Mike

[quote="gr8nash"]any good info on what USB cameras work in linux? or at least what your camera is?[/quote]

Just got motion working with a Logitech Webcam Pro 4000 usb camera. Works quiet well. Main issue is activating the thing when you plug it in. It activates in the non capture state on default.

To find which card your system assigned the webcam to :

[code]arecord -l[/code]

To Activate webcam for capture :

[code]amixer -c <your card number> sset Mic Capture <1-3> cap[/code]

Works great.

Just got motion working with a Logitech Webcam Pro 4000 usb camera. Works quiet well. Main issue is activating the thing when you plug it in. It activates in the non capture state on default.

To find which card your system assigned the webcam to :



To Activate webcam for capture :



Works great.

Hey mjl.. I have been having an issue with motion. Here is the thread I started, was wondering if you had any thoughts...

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ght=motion

Can you post what you have for the .jpg and .mpeg file names. No matter what I do, the mpeg files go to the root of the working directory /myth/motion.

I am able to put the .jpg files wherever (I currently put them in /YYYY/MM/DD). just the mpeg files that are giving me fits.

Thanks

_________________
Knoppmyth R5F27

Hi,
Just noticed an error in my previous post for the motion xml, <text>Clear & Restart Motion</text> The & is a bad thing and may cause the script to abort the frontend Sorry about the typo however the script is now corrected.

Thanks
Mike

Hi,

Has been a day or two since we were here however with R5.5 I am seeing issues with motion that is new. I use motion to help me keep an eye on the kids when they are in the pool so was a bit let down when it went into never never land.

What seems to occur for me is that the when I start motion, it appears to begin ok then just sort of hangs and hangs..........zzzzzzzzz After doing some digging around some forums I think the answer is on the ZoneMinder site. It seems that part of the v4l has been "depreciated" and is no longer a part of the newer kernels. It is the part that works with the bttv chips and causes the call to the driver to go into an endless sleep. If you kill -9 the pid, motion goes defunct until you reboot (actually have to reset sometimes)

And now our new R5.5 comes preloaded with ZoneMinder. It even has a setup menu selection so I would say that is pretty serious stuff. It isn't set to run at boot time as I would suspect only a few will be using it. It isn't quite ready to just start and run anyway, however I will post what I found that gives me access to it. I just am not sure where I found the needed pieces, I think it was on the Ubuntu site.

Shortened story, I was not able to get ZoneMinder to give me pictures either and that was why I ended up on the ZM site digging for hints. At this point it is out of my reach for the magic tweak to bring it to life.

Just figured that since I started this thread, I may as well add an update to what I see.

Thanks
Mike

nano -w zoneminder-setup.sh

It will not be restarted on boot / reboot
edit to fix typo

I just found a typo in that script, could possibly be why it's not working for you.
/etc/init.d/zoneminder start

I'm going to work on getting mine working and will post here what i come up with.