Sunday, May 1, 2016

How to setup raspberry pi with usb camera for streaming video

Found a lot of articles about how to setup USB Camera with raspberry Pi for streaming video. Everything went fine for except one thing, stream stops after 5-10 seconds. Camera indicator still on, but browser stops showing updates, just frozen picture. The problem was that by default motion saves video and snapshots to /var/lib/motion/ directory. And looks like motion doesn't have enough permissions to write into it. So the fix is very easy: sudo chmod 77 /var/lib/motion.

Configuration:
Raspberry Pi3, USB Camera Logictech C300, micro SD 4Gb

How to install motion:

  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get upgrade
  • sudo apt-get install motion

In order to enable remote access and deamon, change these params: 

  • webcam_localhost off
  • daemon on

sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf

To setup daemon, open
sudo nano /etc/default/motion
and set start_motion_daemon=yes

Now you start and stop service by using these commands:
  • sudo service motion start
  • sudo service motion stop
If camera is on and off, everything is set and running. 
Camera can be access remotely via <raspberryIP_address>:8081

Motion FQA can be found here