Detecting movements with Motion
WHO GOES THERE?
The motion detector software, Motion, monitors the video signal from one or multiple cameras and is able to detect whether a significant part of the picture has changed, record and track movement, or launch arbitrary external commands to trigger other actions.
The free Motion [1] software, by Jeroen Vreeken and Kenneth Jahn Lavrsen, can help monitor your office or home while you are away. Motion takes photos and captures videos when movement occurs and, if needed, the computer running the software can mail or text you the images. You can install Motion locally or use a web interface to control it. If needed, the software can monitor multiple cameras.
The install on Ubuntu is relatively simple. Feisty Fawn (7.04) and Edgy Eft (6.10) include version 3.2.3 of the software in their Universe repositories. You also need to install the FFmpeg and nasm packages. Users with Ubuntu 6.10 and 6.06, Debian Sid, and Fedora Core 4 can use the latest version 3.2.7 of Motion. Users with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn will need to build from the source code to have the latest version. Users with SUSE (SUSE Linux 10.1 or openSUSE 10.2) will need to build Motion whatever, as the “Building Motion” box describes.