On 12 November 2015 at 11:11, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
I personally would have thought that JPGs were better for storage space than a movie, esp if you want a snapshot every minute, hour, second (whatever).
My thinking was that movie compression works by storing deltas between images rather than keeping each frame in full so should be "smaller". I can't see how storing each image in full would be better, and indeed movies only store key frames periodically (to assist with random access) to keep the file size down.
Also, jpgs would tend to be named with the timestamp embedded in them, or at the very least, the O/S would store the created time. Not something you'd necessary get from a movie.
The camera can embed a timestamp in the image (ie overlaid on the image, not just as Exif data) so that should solve this.
However, if you go down the batch file to change jpgs into a movie, there's a bunch of articles on-line about how to do things like this.
Thanks, I'll go hunting!
If I recall correctly, some of the camera software (and I thought it was Zoneminder, but I could be wrong), has a facility to add a user-defined mask to the image it sees. This mask is excluded from motion detection.
Yes it can, and actually the camera can do this internally too, but viewing through a tree means the whole image is subject to movement, even though there is enough visibility through the tree to always be able to see the objects of interest. (The view is to a boat on a mooring, and that has the second issue that the water is always rippling and the boat drifts around a bit as well. What I'd like would be to detect the absence of a boat (ie it was pinched!) but just the fact that it's moving isn't cause for concern - indeed lack of movement would be!)
I'm sure there must be a way of automating a task (using crontab?) to check if Zoneminder is still running, and starting it if it isn't. Checking for a PID, or grepping PS and starting it if it's not there?
I've used the likes of monit in the past and can go down this route, but ZoneMinder seems quite heavy for my needs and dependent on lots of libraries that I don't otherwise need when I'm not really doing all that much with it. It might still be the best option though. (It would appear that Ubuntu 15.10 has the latest version, where 15.04 had quite an old version that meant I had to use a PPA version to get some key functionality (I can't remember what that was now).)
Mark