Motion-extended

A wrapper script that adds extra functionality to the motion video motion detection program.

There are many open-source nvr programs out there but many suffer from the same problem(s), difficult to install/setup and trying to be jack of all trades but master of none.

The goal of motion-extended is to take the existing rock-solid 'motion' program and extend it. Motion is a great app but it does not have any scheduling logic (enabling/disabling motion detection caputure for individual cameras based on a date/time schedule). That's the first goal of motion-extended, to support scheduling. More functionality will be added in the future such as sending notifications to various endpoints such as email, Riot(matrix), Slack and more.

Prerequisites

Linux
One or more cameras supported by v4l2 or having RTSP functionality.
PHP CLI >= 7.x
Motion . This program is usually found in the main repositories of your favorite Linux distro.
The PHP Cron Expression Parser - This is needed to process the cron expressions defined for each camera so motion-exteded can determine when to enable/disable them.

Getting Started

Setup motion's configuration files as you usually would. It's highly recommended you use motion's 'cron.d' directory to define each camera's attributes.
Disable motion's global setting 'movie_output' by setting it to 'off'. This setting should be defined on each camera's motion config file. Not doing so will not allow motion-ext to perform scheduling. Program logic has been added to catch this misconfiguration.
Configure motion-extended's configuration file (motion-ext.json) to contain the cron expression(s) for each camera for when you want to capture motion.
Run 'motion-ext'. Don't forget to supply the -c and -e switches which are mandatory.
IMPORTANT! The name of each camera in the 'motion-ext.json' config file must match the motion config file names for each individual camera.
Enjoy!

Example motion-ext.json

{
    "utility-room": 
    {
        "schedules":
        [
            {
                "name": "Capture anything anytime.",
                "cron_expr": "* * * * *"
            }
        ]
    },
    "livingroom":
    {
        "schedules":
        [
            {
                "name": "Late-night captures1.",
                "cron_expr": "* 23 * * *"
            },
            {
                "name": "Late-night captures2.",
                "cron_expr": "* 0-5 * * *"
            }
        ]
    },
    "driveway":
    {
        "schedules":
        [
            {
                "name": "Capture while at work.",
                "cron_expr": "* 7-17 * * *"
            }
        ]
    },
    "downstairs":
    {
        "schedules":
        [
            {
                "name": "Capture anything anytime.",
                "cron_expr": "* * * * *"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Examples

motion-ext -c [/path/to/motion/conf/file] -e [/path/to/motion-ext/json/file]

Why PHP?

I wrote this in PHP because I like PHP and it's a very robust general-purpose scripting language. PHP is not just for webpages. Those who think that only know of PHP from 15 years ago. These days PHP is considered a general-purpose scripting language and its speed now rivals other popular languages such as Python.

Authors

Mike Lee - Lakestone Labs - LakestoneLabs

License

This project is licensed under the GPL 3 license - see the LICENSE.md file for details

lakestonelabs / motion-extended