Re: [Motion-user] Problem with (both camera's and motion's) auto-brightness adjustment

[Barry M. <bar...@gm...>]

Hi Jay!


I’m not an expert but currently at the tail end (hopefully!) of 
correcting a problem I had with my RPi4 (4GB) with two USB cameras 
glitching (usually a partial gray overlay) so a sort-of similar issue.


Your ‘cheap’ SVPro cameras might not be too bad: I’m using an indoor 
version and have a note it is similar to ELP, which is supposed to be 
decent. Have you tested your cameras are working properly – adjusting to 
brightness – plugged in to a different computer? Assign the test 
computer a different IP and view on your browser. (Test RPi on power 
pack, use something like Cheese, view on your phone/tablet.)


As you indicated the problem occurred after a power failure, perhaps the 
SD card is a little corrupted; have you tried swapping in your backup 
card (and making another backup copy before playing too much)? Why it 
would only corrupt the brightness section I have no idea – years ago I 
had a communications software which would corrupt one of its files only 
when I did a specific option. Ended up moving it to a different part of 
the hard drive and it worked fine. (Renamed the file to hold the place, 
reinstalled the one file that was being corrupted.)


My guess is as it worked fine before the power outage and it would seem 
a bit odd for both cameras to fail simultaneously, the repeater cables 
to both fail simultaneously, then that leaves the Pi or its SD card. The 
card seems the most logical candidate. Wall warts can fail over time 
(see my thread “Gray glitching but only one of of two identical 
cameras”: Mark’s reply to me on/about May 23^rd. – I’m thinking with 
your numerous power failures maybe the power supply is now iffy. (I run 
my most of my Pi’s on UPSs or the HAT UPS.)


The RPi4 gpu_mem doesn’t work the same as previous versions: less is 
better. I’m currently using 128 MB, which gives 896 for the CPU 
(vcgencmd get_mem gpu, vcgencmd get_mem arm commands, respectively). 
Assigning too much memory to graphics will ‘starve’ the processor.


...Thought of something: a command option in motion.conf will be 
overwritten by the same command in your camera configurations. 
auto_brightness in the camera’s configuration will be used, but only by 
that specific camera. Default is 0 with a range of 0-3.


There’s another one called vid_control_params which is generally left 
blank. As we both have SVPro cameras I’m thinking you want (in 
motion.conf) *auto_brightness 0* and *vid_control_params* commented out 
or better yet deleted. (See 
https://motion-project.github.io/motion_config.html#picture_quality 
which will get you to the right webpage but wrong section – use your 
browser’s ‘find/search’ option for ‘bright’ to get to the sections I 
mentioned.)


Good Luck!


Barry