motion CCTV

[raywoods]

I've been using motion for my CCTV at home for many years now, without any problems. Earlier this week, after coming home from a week away, I found the system had stopped working. It looks like we've been "upgraded" to a new version. I've gone to the MAN pages and found a new list of commands/attributes to use but, for me the program no longer works. Using Cheese I can see the webcams are okay but motion appears not to find them, except for a blued out reflection of me in the widow!

I'm using an HP Webcam HD 2300 into a USB and registering on /dev/video0

Is anyone else having this problem, or any ideas what is amiss?

If the worst comes to the worse, is there a way to go back to an earlier version?

[Flemur]

If the worst comes to the worse, is there a way to go back to an earlier version?

There are various versions here, with .deb files, which is nice:
https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion/releases

OR -
You could try
gksudo synaptic -> find "motion" ; menu -> package -> force version

Edit - you also might try deleting (or better, renaming) your config files for 'motion' (probably under your $HOME), so the new version has a fresh start.

[raywoods]

Thanks Flemur. I'll persevere a bit longer and if all else fails it's nice you can just roll back in time.

I'll let you know how I get on.

[raywoods]

Well I've been playing about with motion and now have the webcam reacting to movement. Unfortunately, the output JPG files are black/blank. I'm using Mint 19, 64 bit and motion 4.1.1-1 with a simple (old) webcam. With cheese the picture is fine, fed through the USB port. My motion.conf file reads as follows.

target_dir /home/ray/webcam
picture_filename %Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S-%q
auto_brightness boolean on
input -1
videodevice /dev/video0
width 640
height 480
quality 100
#setup_mode on
framerate 2
threshold 10000
minimum_motion_frames 2

This is one of the resultant files

2018-09-23_20-04-49-00.jpg

I've tried loading an earlier version of motion but the problem persists and I'm now wondering if it is one of the libraries motion uses?
Any ideas folks?