Motion is great simple software for surveillance application. And it can be easily install in Ubuntu with apt install.
It is a command line based software. It doesn’t have some fancy GUI, but the setup is quite easy. The default config file is stored as /etc/motion/motion.conf. One would like to create a .motion directory in his home folder. Afterward, copy motion.conf to ~/.motion
I used this as a very preliminary remote surveilance. I found it easier to store picture than movie. So I set movie_output to off and picture_output to on in motion.conf, an exact opposite of the default.
I also changed the target_dir. I simply changed the target directory to a dropbox folder and so it can be synced without the need of setting a webserver.
One could change minimum_motion_frames to larger value as well if they find the motion detector too sensitive.
And in case one has more than one camera, add camera thread file names in motion.conf like
camera /home/user/.motion/thread1.conf camera /home/user/.motion/thread2.conf
Use
v4l2-ctl --list-devices
to figure out the device ids
For example, we have
videodevice /dev/video0 stream_port 8081
-
- in thread1.conf and we have
videodevice /dev/video2 stream_port 8082
-
- in thread2.conf.