Suggestions for simple, but valuable security enhancements

[archived]

Hi,

I'm long time user of Pluto and also its security feature (mainly based on use of Motion-Wrapper)... Since Pluto is approaching stable release, I'd like to suggest few "simple to do" but incredibly valuable additions to its security features.

I'll also be happy for any discussions and additions to this thread.



1. simple changes in Motion wrapper :

1.1  option ffmpeg_filename should be changed to movie_filename (cause of motion evolution). It's simple change in Motion-wrapper.

1.2 maybe we should consider using mysql for security events - motion can enter all events in mysql, so they are much more easily traced and handled. This would also require some work on Pluto's side....



2. Pictures are still not displayed in Security-Alerts Log

I still see 'Photo not available' in Alerts log. Also if user deletes alerts, they are only deleted from pluto's database, while all files on disk that motion made are still there... I'm not sure what causes problems, but we could debug that quite easily...

There are two related entries in Mantis that still didn't solve the problem :

http://plutohome.com/support/mantis/view.php?id=2823

http://plutohome.com/support/mantis/view.php?id=2559



3. It's a simple task to add links to recorded security video movies to alerts page ...

On alerts page there is parameter called Detection Time. For instance I choose one alert with detection time of 2006-11-26 10:29:51

 And if I take a look at directory with camera's movies i see this line :

dcerouter_6097:~# ls -l /home/cameras/168/*2951*
-rw-r--r--  1 root staff 51120 2006-11-26 10:29 /home/cameras/168/02-20061126102951.avi

That means that movies are recorded with detection time in their filename and it could be easy to add this link to alerts page...



4. Add symbolic links to security and time-laps movies so they can be viewed from Orbiters...

This was already suggested, and I'm not sure if got implemented (I always do manual hacks for this on my installation, so I can't say if symbolic links are made by Pluto already).

Maybe it would be wise to give some more meaningful links to cameras (now they are /home/cameras/168 - could be /home/cameras/Living Room linked to previous dir. And latter directories could be symlinked into /home/public/videos/security/ so user could see them from Orbiters. Also some form of deletion possibility would be fine.

Motion also records timelapse videos that are quite interesting to take a look (snapshots taken each minute whole day are played much faster - so you can see what happened during the day). Those movies are in  /home/cameras/168/year/month/.... . Maybe this is not best solution, I think it would be more convenient to put all of them in one directory, for instance :

/home/cameras/xxx/timelapse

sp they can be more easily maintained. This would require simple change in generation of /etc/motion.conf in Motion-wrapper :

now we have :

timelapse_filename %Y/%m/%d-timelapse

and it could be changed to :

timelapse_filename timelapse/%d_%m_%Y_%H_%M_%S

That are really simple changes to motion wrapper.



5. web interface on security-alerts log could be enhanced a bit

It would be convenient to have some sort of calendar widget to select recordings and photos and minimal functionality to maintain tat collection of security movies of snapshots. This is now so hard to achieve....



6. Motion supports IP-cameras too...

ip cameras are now only supported in 'bypass' manner without motion controlling them. It would be realtively easy to add support for IP cameras - so motion will take pictures from them too - all other ipcameras functionality can stay exactly the same as it is now.

Also we will avoid such hacks, that are already being made by many users :

http://plutohome.com/wiki/index.php/IP_Cameras#Using_Motion_to_Record





This are my suggestions for simple, but great enhancements in usability of security features of Pluto. I can give a help on all of them, just let me know when and how. Suggested changes are really simple and shouldn't take too much work. I can work with your programmers to implement them in few hours if not even less....


I'd kindly ask for some discussion on this and other suggestions - but please, stay on course that changes should be fairly trivial, so they can get into stable release...

HTH,

regards,

Rob.