Motion detection triggering recording from a webcam under Ubuntu
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009A client of mine made the switch to Ubuntu from Vista (after Vista constantly threw up on itself over using the AHCI disk mode, despite being shipped that way. One of the lingering issues from the switch has been setting the laptop up to record video from the webcam when motion is detected. I found a number of solutions, but none of them were user friendly enough, or they only captured to stills.
Then I found wxcam. So far it’s a brilliant webcam solution. There were two issues I had installing it, a small one and a big one.
First there was a library dependency that wasn’t available from the 9.04 repos for some reason, but installing the 8.10/Intrepid version went fine. I don’t recall the lib name offhand, but just google for it if you need it.
Second was when I went to run it. It would pop up say it detected the webcam them segfault. Thankfully the mailing list archive provide the answer. Simply edit the .wxcam file in your home directory and correct the resolution that has been mysteriously set to something bizarre, like 1600×1200. The webcam I was setting up runs at 320×240, but setting that to 640×480 is fine and easier to view.
From there it was just a matter of setting the motion trigger area, hitting modify, check the motion detection box and hit record.