[Motion-user] Black video. Good shapshots

[Kinney B. <bau...@sk...>]

Greetings everyone,

I've been happily using my Logitech C260 webcam with motion for a couple of weeks.  So 
happy that I bought another one so I could have 2 running, pointing in different directions.

I created separate thread.conf files for each one.  I Mucked around some because I didn't 
have a good guide to go by.  Still at one point, I had them both working on localhost.  
Wanting to open them up externally, I opened up a port on my router and re-started motion.

The Logitech C260's give a great picture but I had found that I either had to manually 
"rmmod uvcvideo" when I stop motion and "modprobe uvcvideo" when I start motion *or* 
unplug and re-plug the came between starts else I would just get a black screen when I 
viewed it on "localhost".

And, indeed, that's what happened with both cams when I restarted motion after messing 
with my router.

So I dropped back to just one cam, reverted to my original "motion.conf" and still *all* I 
get when viewing the video is a black screen.  *But* the snapshots that are being taken 
are fine.

A point of clarification here, though.  Yes.  The video output of the cam is black *but* 
if there is some motion, I can see some white-specks of the object moving in the black 
screen.  So it isn't totally black all the time. It's almost like it's outputting a mask 
file or something.  I do not have a mask file defined at the moment.  If I do define it, 
all I see is the mask file.

I've unplugged and replugged the cam.  rmmod and modprob'ed until I'm blue in the face.  
I've rebooted with and without the cam plugged in but always the same thing.

Here's the output I'm getting when I start motion up with "setup_mode on".

-- snip --

%/usr/bin/motion -c ./motion.conf
[0] Processing thread 0 - config file ./motion.conf
[0] Motion 3.2.12 Started
[0] ffmpeg LIBAVCODEC_BUILD 3427328 LIBAVFORMAT_BUILD 3425280
[0] Motion running in setup mode.
[0] Thread 1 is from ./motion.conf
[0] Thread 1 is device: /dev/video0 input 8
[0] Webcam port 8888
[0] Waiting for threads to finish, pid: 1920
[1] Thread 1 started
[1] cap.driver: "uvcvideo"
[1] cap.card: "UVC Camera (046d:081a)"
[1] cap.bus_info: "usb-0000:00:10.4-2"
[1] cap.capabilities=0x04000001
[1] - VIDEO_CAPTURE
[1] - STREAMING
[1] Test palette YUYV (320x240)
[1] Using palette YUYV (320x240) bytesperlines 640 sizeimage 153600 colorspace 00000008
[1] found control 0x00980900, "Brightness", range 0,255
[1]     "Brightness", default 128, current 128
[1] found control 0x00980901, "Contrast", range 0,255
[1]     "Contrast", default 32, current 32
[1] found control 0x00980902, "Saturation", range 0,255
[1]     "Saturation", default 32, current 32
[1] found control 0x00980913, "Gain", range 0,255
[1]     "Gain", default 0, current 16
[1] mmap information:
[1] frames=4
[1] 0 length=153600
[1] 1 length=153600
[1] 2 length=153600
[1] 3 length=153600
[1] Using V4L2
[1] Resizing pre_capture buffer to 1 items
[1] Started stream webcam server in port 8888
[1] Resizing pre_capture buffer to 4 items
[1] Raw changes:     0 - changes after 'EedDl':     0 - labels:   0
[1] File of type 2 saved to: /home/krb/.motion/captures/01-20101229122822-snapshot.jpg

-- snip --

Everything looks fine to me.  And, like I said, the pictures being taken are just fine.

The only other aspect of this that seems problematic is if I set "process_id_file 
/var/run/motion/motion.pid", I never get a a pid file in "/var/run/motion".

I'm running the latest version of Arch: 2.6.36-ARCH .

Thoughts anyone?

Thanks.

Kinney