BUG: Timelapsing 640x480 cam hits 2GB file barrier at about 16:51 hours

My motion silently quit today -- running in debug mode, I finally found out why:

> [1] Started stream webcam server in port 8081
> [1] File of type 32 saved to: /home/wusel/public_html/motion/cam_pwc_20051003-timelapse.mpg
> File size limit exceeded

Details:

> wusel@death.uu.org:~ $ ls -la /home/wusel/public_html/motion/cam_pwc_20051003-timelapse.mpg
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 wusel wusel 2147483647 Oct 3 16:51 /home/wusel/public_html/motion/cam_pwc_20051003-timelapse.mpg
> wusel@death.uu.org:~ $ ls -lah /home/wusel/public_html/motion/cam_pwc_20051003-timelapse.mpg
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 wusel wusel 2.0G Oct 3 16:51 /home/wusel/public_html/motion/cam_pwc_20051003-timelapse.mpg

> wusel@death.uu.org:~ $ motion -v
> motion: invalid option -- v
> motion Version 3.2.3, Copyright 2000 Jeroen Vreeken
> wusel@death.uu.org:~ $ rpm -qf `which motion`
> motion-3.2.3-1

Excerps from motion-thread_pwc.conf:

> videodevice /dev/video5
> width 640
> height 480
> ffmpeg_cap_new on
> ffmpeg_timelapse 1
> ffmpeg_timelapse_mode hourly
> ffmpeg_bps 500000
> ffmpeg_variable_bitrate 2
> ffmpeg_video_codec mpeg4

Test case

Configure a time-lapse setup with a 640x480 source. Have it runing the whole day. At my site, it quits with an error after nearly 17 hours.

Environment

Motion version:	3.2.3
ffmpeg version:	0.4.9-pre1, build 4730
Shared libraries:	ffmpeg
Server OS:	Fedora Core 3, kernel 2.6.12-1.1378_FC3

-- TWikiGuest - 03 Oct 2005

Follow up

Well i think that problem is not related to motion itseft rather to ffmpeg , but not sure if there's any trick to allow ffmpeg use files > 2GB.

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AngelCarpintero - 04 Oct 2005

Follow up

No matter what's the cause, it is triggered by motion, using a motion option; may I suggest either a config option setting the max. size of the timelapse MPEG file (useful for archiving on CD/DVD anyway) or at least a graceful recovery on EFBIG? In it's current way, timelapse does not work

-rw-rw-r-- 1 wusel wusel 2147483647 Oct 4 17:29 cam_aip_20051004-timelapse.mpg

Since motion will die directly after trying to append another image, there is no easy way to to a whole day timelapse in 640x480. Please accept it as bug and provide a workround for the next release. Thanks, -kai

-- TWikiGuest - 04 Oct 2005

Follow up

ffmpeg_timelapse_mode hourly
timelapse_filename cam_aip_%Y%%m%%d-%%H-timelapse

Odd. After adding "-%H" to timelapse_filename, now motion generates one file per hour, so this sort of solves my problem. Nonetheless, I suggest to implement a better way to handle the reported behaviour than simply to abort(). -kai

-- TWikiGuest - 05 Oct 2005

Fix record

There's a problem related to size of AVI files , because a AVI 1.0 file format can't be bigger than 2GB. So with ffmpeg there's not way to create mpeg1 files bigger than 2GB.

-- AngelCarpintero - 12 Dec 2005