Video surveillance with the Raspberry Pi

Up To Date

If you are looking to add new cameras to a system that you operate on a Video4Linux basis, you will want to update the software up front. Because motionEyeOS is under constant development, the developers not only add new driver modules, but also frequently extend the system, adding new functions and fixing bugs.

To let you update the system, the General Settings group contains the Check button for the Software Update option, which motionEyeOS uses to search for updates and automatically install, if necessary (Figure 5).

Figure 5: An integrated update routine keeps the software up to date.

Backup

Configuring motionEyeOS can be quite complex, especially if you are using several cameras with different interfaces. To avoid losing the setup you have established in the event of an accident or theft of the control computer, the General Settings | Configuration | Backup button lets you save all the settings.

The software prompts you for the target path; by default, this is the computer on which you access the motionEyeOS computer. The software stores the configuration files there as a tar.gz archive (Figure 6). The Restore button on the motionEyeOS computer's dashboard lets you restore the configuration files later on if need be.

Figure 6: All the critical data in a single archive: the motionEyeOS config content.

Conclusions

MotionEyeOS gives you a complete, well-thought-out, and logical video surveillance solution for your Raspberry Pi. The package also impresses with its excellent stability, great flexibility for setups that use different types of surveillance cameras, and feature set that satisfies even professional requirements. The software's intuitive operating philosophy rounds off the package. For safety-conscious users, motionEyeOS provides an excellent and efficient way to monitor exposed locations.

Infos

  1. motionEyeOS: https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki
  2. Download: https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/releases

The Author

Erik Bärwaldt is a self-employed IT-admin and technical author living in Scarborough (United Kingdom). He writes for several IT-magazines.

« Previous 1 2 3

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subs
Digisubs
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • PiCam Surveillance

    The new PiCam camera for the Raspberry Pi delivers image data with very little overhead, making it ideal for video surveillance applications. We find the bumps in the road you'll encounter and show you how to smooth them out with a few Linux commands and pipes.

    more »
  • Charly's Column

    Commercial surveillance systems are expensive and typically involve maintenance agreements. I thought there must be a low-budget alternative.

    more »
  • Security Lessons: Secure Video

    Unless your surveillance cameras are wired directly to a video board, they are notoriously insecure. We show you how to keep your cameras from being compromised.

    more »
  • Surveillance with NAS

    Take advantage of the low watt per operation compute power offered by modern NAS to monitor your cameras.

    more »
  • Motion Detection

    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.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus

Visit Our Shop

Trial Subscription

Digital Subscription

Subscribe

Direct Download

Read full article as PDF:

Price $2.95

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Linux Pro Magazine Mobile Programming Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source