Netcam Connection Issues in 3.1.19

Question

I've just upgraded from 3.1.17 to 3.1.19 and seem to be having some netcam connection issues. (Everything worked ok in 3.1.17).

I'm running LFS 5.0 with a 2.4.22 kernal running dhcdp, bind & postfix. I've got two Axis 205 netcams on the network that get IP address from dhcp. I can browse to the cameras OK using thier assigned names from my XP PCs.

Now when motion is running I am getting the following messages out to the log every 6-12 minutes :

motion: Netcam: thread 2: can't conenct to server
motion: Netcam: thread 2: error connection, retrying [0]

The thread varies between 1 and 2.

It would appear that while this is happening things seem to be running OK (motion is being detected and files output.)

However every now and then (6 times today in a 8 hour period) I got very odd output. 4 files are output in one motion all pertaining to come from Camera 1. The first picture however was from camera 2 and the other 3 were from camera 2? (I've included the 4 pictures which show the pixal changed count, top right).

I've also noticed that I've got 7 motion instances running now, rather than 5 that I had in 3.1.17.

My first thought was something to do with 7 processes now instead of 5. I thought I might be doubling up on processes but I can't see anything in the config files that would do that.

I'm starting motion from the command line with no command line parms.

Your thoughts on this would be appreciated. If there is something futher I can do to assist in a resolution then please ask.

Environment

Motion version:	3.1.19
ffmpeg version:
Libraries:	curl, xmlrpc, ffmpeg, mysql, postgresql
Server OS:	LFS 5.0 Kernal 2.4.22

-- TheSpike - 10 Mar 2005

Answer

The stability of the netcam driver is still an issue. We are working to correct this, sorry for the inconvience. I am currently working on a major overhaul of the netcam code right now and things are going fairly well on my end. Hopefully I can finish cleaning up my current modifications and post a patch this weekend to get into the next development release. I intend to backport changes to the latest stable release, but this won't happen until after the next development release.

As for the additional threads you are seeing, the netcam module now starts an additional thread for each netcam. This thread actually processes the incoming stream and dumps them into buffers, while the original thread reads the images from the buffers. So, this is normal.

-- ChristopherPrice - 18 Mar 2005

Comment

Thanks for your response.

I've just uploaded some mjpegsnif output for one of my Axis 205 Cameras. I'll give the new 3.1.20snap3 a blast too.

-- TheSpike - 29 Mar 2005