Re: [Motion-user] Motion Success Story

[john b. <jo...@jo...>]

On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 18:00 -0600, Chris Turner wrote:
> I would like to share a success story with all the Motion developers and users.
> I am the IT person at a car dealership in Texas.  I've pushed for a
> nice surveillance system but there's never been the need or budget for
> it.
> The day before Christmas at 4 in the morning our store was broken
> into.  They were after money as they left everything else alone.  I
> had put two Panasonic BL-C10A cameras up to record via Motion, as well
> as to display the video on a monitor on the wall so we could see if a
> customer was waiting.
> The person that broke in knew exactly where the cameras were and stole
> them, as well as the computer used to display both instances of Motion
> on a large monitor.  They did not realize the video was being recorded
> on a server and only being displayed on that monitor.
> That morning I transcoded and burned the videos to DVD and also put
> the original files on CD and gave them to the police.
> Today three employees were arrested for being connected to the crime.
> One saw the video as we were playing it back and panicked, contacting
> the others involved.  One of them talked to the police and spilled the
> beans since it was his face on videos.  He had a lawyer and
> everything.
> It's a stroke of luck that I had fixed the video recording issue less
> than a week prior.  Upgrading to Slackware 12 broke libavcodec and it
> was a mess getting it working again.
> 
> Which brings me to a feature request.  I'd like to be able to get an
> email when a motion event happens at an unusual hour (between times
> specified in the conf file).  This could be done with cron and a small
> script to check the number of files in the recorded directory and
> email when something changes, but integrating it with Motion (with an
> option to email frames 1, 10, etc at the same time) would be very
> nice.  If I had received an email on my Blackberry at 4 am, it would
> have woken me up and I could have checked out the cameras, and caught
> them in the act.  Either way, THANK YOU MOTION DEVELOPERS!

hey chris!  that's a great story!  thanks for sharing it with all of us.

on_event_start defines a command that can be run on a movie starting.
it could point to your own script and do whatever you wanted it to do
based on the time, phase of the moon, etc.  eh?

john
-- 
cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.