Raspberry pi with webcam, motion, and FTP

Question

I have a webcam connected to my Raspberry Pi, and I am running Motion to make pictures and upload this to an FTP server.

With my current configuration, wput/Motion uploads ~3-10 pictures/second, which is not what I want; this overloads the FTP server & the rPi, is a waste of bandwidth, and causes pictures to be half uploaded and overwritten all the time anyway.

This is my current config: http://pastebin.com/iyrW3BHg

Is there a way to tell Motion to only update webcam3.jpg once every 30 to 60 seconds? Or to only execute wput once during that interval?

Answer 1

I would go with the snapshot_interval parameter, which tells motion to take a snapshot from the webcam every n seconds.

See http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/ConfigOptionSnapshotInterval

Using this option doesn't prevent you from getting a high framerate for other needs, such as a live feed provided on port 8081 using the webcam_* parameters (see documentation)

Answer 2

Motion has a configuration option minimum_frame_time defined in the manual which can be used to set the program to capture less than 1 frames per second and so can be used for your purpose.

Here are the details for the minimum_frame_time option taken from the documentation.

minimum_frame_time   Values: 0 - 2147483647
Default: 0   Minimum time in seconds between the capturing picture frames from the camera. 
Default: 0 = disabled - the capture rate is given by the camera framerate.

This option was introduced in the version 3.2.7 of motion and replaced minimum_gap which can be used if you are using the older version.

When this is enabled the framerate option is used only to set the pace the Motion service the webcam port etc. Running Motion at framerate 2 is normally fine.

The option is there in line 83 of your configuration document.Changing it there should be enough.

PS-Restart the service for changes to take place.

Hope it helps.