One thing I wanted to look into was the use of the Raspberry Pi as a low-cost, linux based security camera. Key goals were:

• Recording of HD Video
• Live stream via web browser

This sets out the steps I did to get it up and running – consider some of the previous posts on the Raspberry to lock it down before opening it to the big bad interweb.

Raspberry Pi Configuration

Disable the camera led – lets not make it too obvious if we are, or aren’t recording. Add the following line to /boot/config.txt

disable_camera_led=1

There is a free, open-source motion detection/surveillance software package that we can use, called motion. Unfortunately it doesn’t yet support the Raspberry Pi Camera Module natively yet, so a special build is required.

sudo apt-get install motion
sudo apt-get remove motion

This is a little odd, but the main goal is that the APT package manager will install all the dependencies, add the service account, etc.

Then we get the customised motion package and install it:

wget https://www.dropbox.com/s/xdfcxm5hu71s97d/motion-mmal.tar.gz
tar zxvf motion-mmal.tar.gz
sudo mv motion /usr/bin/motion
sudo mv motion-mmalcam.conf /etc/motion.conf

We then need to enable motion to run as a daemon by editing /etc/default/motion to include

start_motion_daemon=yes

The main motion configuration file is /etc/motion.conf, but lets make sure that the permissions are sufficient for the motion user to modify them

sudo chmod 664 /etc/motion.conf
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/motion
sudo touch /tmp/motion.log
sudo chmod 775 /tmp/motion.log

At this point I tried to run it from the CLI, but was missing a library:

pi@watcher ~ $ motion
motion: error while loading shared libraries: libjpeg.so.62: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Easily solved:

sudo apt-get install libjpeg62

motion.conf – some key changes

daemon on
process_id_file /tmp/motion.pid

logfile /home/pi/motion.log

width 1280
height 720

framerate 2

pre_capture 2
post_capture 2

max_movie_time 600

ffmpeg_video_codec msmpeg4

stream_localhost off

stream_auth_method 2
stream_authentication USERNAME:PASSWORD

There are many configuration options, all of which are detailed in the motion config documentation

If we are running it as a daemon on boot we also need to update /etc/init.d/motion with the log and PID variables e.g.

PIDFILE=/tmp/$NAME.pid

So far the streaming works fine is Firefox and Safari, but not Chrome.