prupert » Motion Video

Bluetooth controlled motion start-up script

prupert — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:04:25 +0000

So, after messing with ZoneMinder and creating a bluetooth script for it, I am now messing with motion instead, and have modified the script accordingly.

For kicks, I have hosted it on google code

http://code.google.com/p/bluetoothmotion/

It also details a fix for the problem with motion on Ubuntu and the /etc/init.d/motion stratup script.

motion 1 zoneminder 0

prupert — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:11:01 +0000

So, after messing around with ZoneMinder for a few weeks, I finally gave up. I then decided to try out motion instead, which I had heard a lot about, but largely ignored because it didn’t have a fancy website or nice looking web GUI.

Oh how wrong I was. Motion is so much better than ZoneMinder, I am sorry to say. It has a very basic web interface, allowing you to start and stop motion detection and view a live stream from one camera at a time. However, it really beats ZoneMinder into a cocked hat when you look at support for webcams. I had so many problems getting my webcams working in ZoneMinder, but in motion, you just tell it your video device locations (/dev/video0 etc) and off it goes.

There are some additional php packages out there allowing you to create webcam stream montages and view previous alerts created by motion. Although all configuration is done via a text config file, the file is well laid out and well commented and thus easy to understand.

I would highly recommend motion over ZoneMinder and am using it now as my main geek project. I am thus updating my bluetooth script to work with motion and will post the new version soon.

Open source programming sketchpad reaches version 1

prupert — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:02:38 +0000

Processing is an awesome open source programming language and sketchpad that allows you to write graphical and audio applications, as well as other tools. It has been embraced by the artistic programming community and has spawned countless beautiful and interesting images and videos.

processing

After what seems like an eternity in beta, is has finally reached version 1 (Gmail, are you listening?). I am not a programmer and so never have got to grips with it, but I am always impressed by what people have created using it. One such example is the Audi TT Movement advert that went ‘viral’ last year.