Protect my motion webcam stream with a password (motion.conf)

Question

I set up a webcam server using motion. The video is correctly streamed to Internet. Now I would like to protect the stream with a password: I don't want unknown people to spy on me! I don't know how to do this. In motion.conf, there are attributes:

• control_authentification

To protect HTTP Control by username and password, use this option for HTTP 1.1 Basic authentication. The string is specified as username:password. Do not specify this option for no authentication. This option must be placed in motion.conf and not in a thread config file.

• netcam_userpass

For network cameras protected by username and password, use this option for HTTP 1.1 Basic authentication. The string is specified as username:password. Do not specify this option for no authentication.

I don't understand these two arguments so I tried both of them but it did not work...

Answer 1

To setup a username and password with motion, you need to edit motion configuration file. Steps

1. Open terminal

2. Type sudo nano /etc/motion/motion/conf

3. Add in a new line stream_auth_method 1

4. Add in a new line stream_authentication username:password

5. Ctrl + X

6. Press Y, Press Enter

Answer 2

netcam_userpass is to connect motion to a webcam that is protected by a username and password. This can happen for instance, if you are running a webcam program on a cellphone and have set a username/pass there.

In order to protect your motion cam to the outside internet, you'd need to setup either an Apache or Nginx proxy to a cgi program (mjprox) that watches motion, with http authentication attached (htaccess / htpasswd).

Information on mjprox can be found here.