Hi all, long term user of Motion for Linux here. I thought I’d try Bluecherry yesterday while I was out in my workshop. I set up an old ER1402 low powered PC (like the old Revo Atom machines) with a fresh install of 20.04 Server and installed the software.
First issues I had was getting the two cheapo Chinese cameras working. Nothing was detected with ONVIF so managed to get them going manually after a bit of messing about. Then couldn’t view them as the VAAPI rendering device didn’t seem to be recognised. I added bluecherry to the rendering group and off we went again.
Observations and feeback ? I like it. I like it quite a lot and although the motion detection on two cameras eats up the CPU it just about struggles through.
Questions ? I notice bursts of writing to the SSD on my PC when in Motion only mode, does the buffering take place in memory or does it cache to the hard drive ? If it does use the hard drive for buffering, could there be an option to either cache to a ramdisk (for example) or select an alternative drive / location ?
I have a range of cheap Chinese cameras. None of these seems to trigger the Onvif motion although they do all have the option for an alarm server output (this sends a packet to a remote device on port 150002 as default although it can be changed). Would it be possible on bluecherry to have a port trigger where any packet sent to that port would trigger a recording ? It wouldn’t even have to be intelligent enough to parse the info, just trigger when spoken to. This would enable me (and others) to use the on camera motion detection while dropping the CPU utilisation on the server significantly. It could also be used for home automation to trigger recordings …
Playback on a browser is a bit “scrolly” - if you could have the events in a left hand pane with the video on the right it would be far easier to flick through the events. I currently have quite a large video screen with all the events in a list box underneath so I can either see one or the other.
Apart from some minor niggles, I’m quite impressed with this software so far. I’ve tried most of the other offerings for Linux out there and with energy prices hitting an all time high in the UK have decided to downsize all my server equipment and go for low powered boxes. While it would be easy enough for me to write some software to grab the motion events from the cameras and dump a circular buffer of video if an event is detected, bluecherry almost ticks all the boxes for an off the shelf solution.
Keep up the good work guys 