Adjusting webcam settings before motion thread grabs camera

Question

I am using a logitech camera with autofocus. At night the autofocus gets completely confused and leaves the camera wildly out of focus.

From command line I can easily set the camera to manual focus and set a focus value that will work, this needs to happen once as motion service starts up, but I cannot see a way to call this in the config files.

Also If I set the camera into manual focus, I am assuming that motion will not reset this.

No error message

Environment

Motion version:	3.2.12
ffmpeg version:
Libraries:	ffmpeg, mysql, postgresql
Server OS:	raspbian

-- IaMalcolm - 07 Feb 2016

Answer

I found I can call v4l2-ctl even when motion is driving the camera, so easy to tweak this from a script at start up, although this means the first image may be a bit naff, but this is a pretty good workaround