Feature Request: Watchdog which restarts a dead camera thread

Description

See my answer on SupportQuestion2005x01x03x114817

See also discussion topic MotionWatchdog.

-- KennethLavrsen - 31 Mar 2005

Follow up

Surprise. I accept my own proposal. Feel free to discuss anyway.

-- KennethLavrsen - 31 Mar 2005

Comments

Some mechanism to restart a dead thread is a GOOD IDEA and should be implemented IMMEDIATELY, because I frequently have camera hangs and messages like this in my log repeating forever every three seconds:

Jan 4 05:57:53 bach motion: [6] connect returned error Jan 4 05:57:53 bach motion: [6] re-opening camera (non-streaming)

-- GregSwift - 04 Jan 2006

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Watchdog feature is not for network cameras but v4l/2 devices , because netcam has its own recovery method.

-- AngelCarpintero - 05 Jan 2006

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Part of a shell script I use, called every 5 minutes via cron to keep motion going if it crashes. I run a new motion for each camera and have had good luck for many years this way.

ps aux | grep "motionf3/motion" if [ $? -ne 0 ] then echo "Motion3 not running, starting it" /root/motionf3/restart-motion fi

ps aux | grep "motionf4/motion" if [ $? -ne 0 ] then echo "Motion4 not running, starting it" /root/motionf4/restart-motion fi

-- TWikiGuest - 03 Apr 2006

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The watchdog should be included for netcams also because in my specific setup my threads die on netcams (they last less than 24 hours), and although the netcams are working properly (I can visit them directly via HTTP) nothing is recorded. The motion progam never dies, so the cron job method will not work. Instead the program just outputs "video signal lost" and the threads never recover.

-- MichaelHarris - 05 Apr 2006

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