A slice of life

(Kind of) Live video, from the trailing edge of suburbia

Take a peek at everyday life in a residential street in suburban London (Chessington, to be precise).  This area is right at the very furthest south-western reaches of the London conurbation.  Green Belt land is only some five to ten minutes walk away.

What you are looking at are static frames from cheap USB cameras, captured by motion-sensing software (the detected motion in the frame highlighted by a box).  The page will reload every 30 seconds or so, but the pictures only change when specific signs of movement are detected in the field of view.

During the day, you are most likely to see such things things as the neighbourhood cats patrolling, pedestrians walking past - quite often parents escorting their children to or from school, the rubbish being collected, the postman, or that quaint British tradition - the milkman.  A typical slice of suburban British life.  You will see cars night or day, although at night they just leave interesting light trails.

It should not be necessary for me to say this, but unfortunately I need to, following the recent inconsiderate actions of others: do not link directly to any of these camera images without first obtaining my express permission.  In the absence of specific individual agreement to the contrary, all permission to use either camera's output or their archive images is expressly denied.  At present that means that no other site has permission to link to these images.  Whilst these images are freely publicly viewable on this site they are intended merely as a curiosity.  They are not placed in the public domain nor provided for use by any other party for any purpose whatsoever.  Can I make it any clearer?

Past pictures

Here are some of my favourite recent snapshots.  Unfortunately, I simply do not have the bandwidth to put the videos online.

How it is done

The webcam system is implemented on an old Pentium II machine, with 128Mb RAM, running (Slackware) linux with Video4Linux drivers, Motion v3.1.18, and ffmpeg v0.4.8, Apache web server and PHP to create the dynamic information on the page.  These are all old versions, largely superceded, but they're stable and they work.

Camera 1 tends to be an old Logitech Quickcam Express which I've had for years, and hence stable.  ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it.")  Camera 2 tends to be experimental, or more likely, offline altogether.  The reason for the page's creation is simply one of (almost) idle curiosity, the interest for me was in the making and in learning from doing so, but once made it seemed pointless not to put it online.

Next up - to upgrade the camera hardware and to capture simultaneous images from adjacently mounted cameras, to get a stereoscopic view.

Recent releases of Motion (version 3.2.x)

I tried upgrading to the December 2005 version of Motion only to find somewhat bizarrely that the command line options - which I make extensive use of - have been removed, or worse had their usage completely change.  Just teensy weensy little things like not being able to specify the target directory or not being able to force daemon mode if the default file configuration is foreground running.  Completely obscure little features that no-one would have any use for - NOT!  Consequently I'm stuck with the increasingly aged version 3.1.18 until I can unbreak the stupidity, and and retrofit the command line features back myself (which I'm working on).  I'm damned if I'm going to create a whole stack of config files for each eventuality just so I can move onto newer versions.  The trouble is, this logical brick wall means that I'm unable to fixes and new developments in the more recent releases.  For the moment I have no choice but to stick with what works largely, and requires least effort (although the main purpose the attempted upgrade was to try to overcome some problems which may have been fixed in newer releases).  What motivated the team to make the apparently crazy decision to remove working features?  It's not like it was a particularly bloated piece of software.  I simply fail to understand.  Someone please tell me I'm not out of my mind here, that I haven't slipped in un-noticed from another universe, and that maintaining backward compatibilty for exisitng users is an important issue.  It's a crying shame, because I love the basic package, and all that great work has been rendered useless by one act of ill-considered vandalism.