Using ov519 - USB Camera that outputs an MJPEG stream?

Question

I have a GE EasyCamPro, Model H098064 which uses the ov51x module (availabe from: http://alpha.ovcam.org/ov511/ ..to get support for the ov519), and apparently outputs an MJPEG stream. It seems that MJPEG streams are somewhat uncommon among USB Cams, and few software packages support it (xawtv does not appear to, for instance). The program gqcam does support it, and I am able to confirm that the camera works with that package (downloaded from: http://giansalvo.free.fr/?p=projects ).

I've installed motion from motion-3.2.1-1.i386.rpm downloaded from this site.

When I run motion without options, it triggers motion on every frame and the jpegs that are output by motion show a green field with the upper ~1/10th portion of the screen filled with static (consistent to what xawtv shows when connecting to this USBcam).

I looked through the man page for motion for references to mjpeg streams, and found some in relation to the netcam_url. While it did not seem a direct fit, I couldn't find anything more apropos-- so I thought I'd try to somehow employ that with a motion.conf file that looked like this: netcam_url file:///dev/video0 ...but the response I got was this: Processing thread 0 - config file motion.conf Thread 0 started [0] netcam: invalid url [file:///dev/video0] [0] Capture error Success Thread 0 finishing...

I got the same sort of result when I tried the line as: netcam_url /dev/video0

So, did I miss something about how to directly support ov519-like cameras that apparently do a jpeg stream?

Environment

Motion version:	3.2.1
ffmpeg version:
Libraries:	curl, xmlrpc, ffmpeg, mysql, postgresql
Server OS:	FC2 kernel 2.6.10-1.771_FC2

-- TWikiGuest - 08 Jun 2005

Answer

The file:// will not work I am sure. But if you could create some small local application that will connect to the camera and send the mjpeg stream to any program that connects to an open tcp socket then you could reach it with http://localhost:someport

-- KennethLavrsen - 27 Jun 2005