Features of Surveillance Camera’s using Motion (view recordings/motion events)

[Robert]

Hi,

I have just begun trying out LinuxMCE, and I have so far been impressed. I am trying to setup a camera for surveillance. My aim is to be able to watch it in realtime, as well as rewind and jump to marked events.

Does LinuxMCE provide these features?

I have set up the camera using the "Motion Wrapper" and "Generic Analogy Camera" device templates, for a  Hauppauge BT878 capture card. Now in the security section of the Media Director there is an entry for the camera, clicking on it brings up the realtime view, with buttons that appear to be for pan/tilt/zoom.

I have played around with the options, such as setting it to record continually, and adding a button to the Media Director to view four cameras at once. However I have not found a way to view the recordings of motion events, or manually rewind the feed.

Does anyone know if these features are available, and if so how to go about setting them up, or a link to a tutorial? Any help would be very much appreciated.

kind regards,
Robert

[tschak909]

Time delay is currently not available with the surveillance subsystem. It could be added though.

-Thom

[bulek]

Hi,

motion under LMCE is pretty much standard motion installation (with automatic creation of files in /etc/motion)...

So if you inspect /home/cameras directories, you'll find there snapshots and movies (motion detection, time lapse, etc....).

Currently you can't do pretty much of mentioned features, the only thing is to make symbolic links from cameras directories to public videos directories, so you could view them from media browser...

There is new viewer that could be interesting for  motion (search for Kmotion web viewer), but it should be adapted to LMCE (I guess not a small task to do)... Currently it seems that zoneminder (it has mythtv plugin) could better support wanted features, but it's not integrated under LMCE at all...

HTH,

regards,

Bulek.
 

[Robert]

Thank you for the replies. It is unfortunate that LinuxMCE doesn't have these features built in.

In terms of adding the features. I have not had any experience with LinuxMCE development, so I am unsure how difficult it would be. However I am interested and currently doing some reading around. The main criteria I would have for the surveillance camera part of LinuxMCE are:

1. be able to take advantage of hardware encoded camera streams (like from hardware encoder cards or mpeg4 streaming ip cameras).
2. saving the stream in mpeg form would taking advantage of the relative static nature of camera pictures for the encoding - only the differences between frames is saved.
3. be able to seek to any point in the archive of recordings
4. be able to quickly seek to marked places (events)

My idea on how to do this would be to:
1. take input of camera stream
2. save to video file - either direct copy stream (for pre [hardware] encoded streams) or software encode to a codec of users choice.
3. save stream as 1 hour long files placed in http (apache) public folder
4. use vlc or similar to stream files - allowing for seeking  and multiple orbiters can view files independently at once.
5. make the player know what to do if seek past beginning/end of a file stream i.e. play next file in chronological order
6. if want motion detection either pass a stream to motion (the program) or use inbuilt camera motion detection
7. time (file and position in file) of detected motion saved to database
8. section of ui listing motion events, allowing user to select and seek to time of the event in the stream.

I would appreciate any advise. If anyone with more experience than me in LinuxMCE development would like to take up the challenge I would be glad to hear from them.

Robert

[rocketlynx]

Has anything progressed on viewing/playing back archived surveillance camera video?
Under LinuxMCE Admin-->Security-->View Cameras, the LinuxMCE Wiki Says:

"Here you can view all your security cameras either live, or if you enabled archiving, you can view a video archive of the cameras. Refer to the Wizard > Devices > Surveillance Cameras page to specify which cameras should be archived.

Simply check the box of the camera that you would like to view."

But the feature does not exist.  Am I missing it somewhere else?

Thanks,
Charles

[los93sol]

Wouldn't the easiest implementation of viewing the videos properly within LMCE be to create a new category of video, "Surveilance", and tag them as such in the database if they come from the motion directory?  In this way you could filter on them from the existing video plug-in without having to go through creating a whole new subsystem to handle just this feature?  Also, moving forward any enhancements to the video plug-in would be inherited by this feature.  Seems the best solution to me.

[murcel]

Has anything progressed on viewing/playing back archived surveillance camera video?
Under LinuxMCE Admin-->Security-->View Cameras, the LinuxMCE Wiki Says:

"Here you can view all your security cameras either live, or if you enabled archiving, you can view a video archive of the cameras. Refer to the Wizard > Devices > Surveillance Cameras page to specify which cameras should be archived.

Simply check the box of the camera that you would like to view."

But the feature does not exist.  Am I missing it somewhere else?

Thanks,
Charles

Charles,

if you set up the camera, like it should, then the feature is there.

[totallymaxed]

Has anything progressed on viewing/playing back archived surveillance camera video?
Under LinuxMCE Admin-->Security-->View Cameras, the LinuxMCE Wiki Says:

"Here you can view all your security cameras either live, or if you enabled archiving, you can view a video archive of the cameras. Refer to the Wizard > Devices > Surveillance Cameras page to specify which cameras should be archived.

Simply check the box of the camera that you would like to view."

But the feature does not exist.  Am I missing it somewhere else?

Thanks,
Charles

Charles,

if you set up the camera, like it should, then the feature is there.

Hmmm...I dont think archiving or any other surveillance video management features are implemented currently in fact. This area needs a considerable amount of work in fact.

Andrew

[fido]

If you have a camera setup under motion, recordings are stored under /home/cameras/XX

where XX is the deviceID of the camera

You get a full daily timelapse recording of each cam and i think a video of any motion triggered events... ( cant confirm that last bit as not at my machine )

You can set up a sym link to the directory so that they show up in the video list in lmce

Edit...just noticed bulek had already pointed this info out!

[totallymaxed]

If you have a camera setup under motion, recordings are stored under /home/cameras/XX

where XX is the deviceID of the camera

You get a full daily timelapse recording of each cam and i think a video of any motion triggered events... ( cant confirm that last bit as not at my machine )

You can set up a sym link to the directory so that they show up in the video list in lmce

Edit...just noticed bulek had already pointed this info out!

Yep...but all of the 'management' features mentioned in the Wiki... are not there and have never been :-(

Andrew

[los93sol]

Would my suggestion earlier in this thread fit the need for reviewing cameras for you guys?  It seems the most proper way to handle it to me

[skeptic]

I don't have a camera yet, but as someone that plans to implement all the security features in the future I'm reading this thread with interest.

Wouldn't the easiest implementation of viewing the videos properly within LinuxMCE be to create a new category of video, "Surveilance", and tag them as such in the database if they come from the motion directory?  In this way you could filter on them from the existing video plug-in without having to go through creating a whole new subsystem to handle just this feature?  Also, moving forward any enhancements to the video plug-in would be inherited by this feature.  Seems the best solution to me.

It's already an annoyance to wade through tv recordings or change the filter every time you want to watch a movie, adding a bunch of security videos to the mix will make it more of a mess.  Not to mention what happens if your movies are not all tagged as movies, which happens with videos not ripped with LMCE (LMCE can't rip all DVDs, you may want to rip just the movie and possibly transcode it to a smaller file).  You can always go back and manually set the type like I try to do, but what if you miss some?  Currently, there is no way that I know to exclude types, it's either show all or specifically pick the types to include, and there is no way to save the settings so you'd have to set the filter every time you browse.  I have no idea if 810 will address this, but as nothing more than an end user I humbly suggest not lumping security videos in with all the others.  One thing is guaranteed, the WAF would drop to near zero if security video was lumped in with videos in the current version.

However, what you suggest does make perfect sense with enhancements to the current video browser.  This would work well as long as there is a separate video browser just for surveillance and the normal video browser filtered out all surveillance video even when "ALL" video media is shown.   As this is related, from a purely end-user point of view, the best solution would be to enhance the filters to 1) allow excludes as well as includes - i.e. allow the user set the filter to include all video files except security and tv shows and 2) allow filter setups to be saved (or removed) as a menu option with a customized name, i.e. instead of media -> video it would be media -> video -> surveillance or media -> video -> TV shows or media -> video -> my custom action movie list.

I'm not a developer, but to me enhancing the video filters would allow use of the existing video backend while improving the end user experience instead of making it more difficult or cluttered.

[los93sol]

You're missing the whole point of filters.  I think what you want is custom filters and the ability to easily create your own.

[skeptic]

You're missing the whole point of filters.  I think what you want is custom filters and the ability to easily create your own.

If I'm missing the point, then explain it.

My understanding is filters are a way of selecting media based on criteria, be it media type, genre, whatever.  Specifically as they relate to this topic and your suggestion of adding security video to the existing video pool, the existing method 710 uses for filtering videos would degrade the end user experience.  Adding security video functionality is great, lumping it in with existing videos and telling users they need to tag their videos properly and adjust the filter every time they want to browse for a movie and not see a bunch of security videos in the list is not.

If I misunderstand your idea, or if 810 has enhanced filtering options to make this not an issue then please correct me.  I may be completely wrong about what you want to do and what affect it would have.  What I do know is I'd love to be able to setup surveillance cameras and be able to review the video from them, but if it meant all the security videos showed up in my movie list it would not be worth it.  I'd hate it, my wife would hate it, and I wouldn't use it.

To answer your second part, yes, easy to create custom filters sounds to me like a good way to deal with this as well as adding other benefits.

[rocketlynx]

Has anything progressed on viewing/playing back archived surveillance camera video?
Under LinuxMCE Admin-->Security-->View Cameras, the LinuxMCE Wiki Says:

"Here you can view all your security cameras either live, or if you enabled archiving, you can view a video archive of the cameras. Refer to the Wizard > Devices > Surveillance Cameras page to specify which cameras should be archived.

Simply check the box of the camera that you would like to view."

But the feature does not exist.  Am I missing it somewhere else?

Thanks,
Charles

Charles,

if you set up the camera, like it should, then the feature is there.

Sorry, but it isn't.  I've set up three cameras, 1 IP and 2 via a Bluecherry PV-143 PCI card.  All are set up and capturing video. I've checked the camera directories for each device.  Videos are there and jpegs are there.  there is no provision to find, select or view anything but live camera views that I can find in the Admin.

If you have a camera setup under motion, recordings are stored under /home/cameras/XX

where XX is the deviceID of the camera

You get a full daily timelapse recording of each cam and i think a video of any motion triggered events... ( cant confirm that last bit as not at my machine )

You can set up a sym link to the directory so that they show up in the video list in lmce

Edit...just noticed bulek had already pointed this info out!

Could you please elaborate on setting a sym link or did I miss that in the Wiki?
Thanks,
Charles