Trying to get 'motion' working for camera support

Support
1

Been following tutorials on installing motion but I am having problems with ‘libavformat53’. The installation cannot seem to find it and hence motion does not work. Also, after having gone through the tutorial, during the pi bootup I see a “FAILED” in red but it scrolls past too fast to read it. Is there a way of pausing the bootup sequence?

2

Which tutorial are you following? Chances are it could be out of date.

Is this on Raspbian Stretch? (the latest version) it could be that the libavformat version is now libavformat56 rather than libavformat53

What do you see if you run:

apt search libavformat

And:

dpkg -L libavformat56

It might suffice to:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libavformat.so.56.1.0 /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libavformat.so.53.1.0
3
  1. It finds libavformat56
  2. I guess its unpacking various files associated with libavformat56
  3. I don’t fully understand the command but looking at file manager I can only find libavformat56 etc within 2 further sub directories /neon/vfp so I wonder if your command would actually do anything?

I have looked at 3 separate tutorials on installing motion and they all seem to do the same thing but they may well be out of date. When I do sudo motion it returns an error suggesting that there is no such file libavformat53 which makes sense if its no longer on the system…has it been superceded by .56? So I did try renaming .56 to .53 in file manager but it would not allow it. I guess I would have to do a sudo command to do that but I’m not sure of the correct syntax. All in all its hard work…is there something else other than motion I can use?

4

I’m guessing they were all written for Raspbian Jessie (the version before Stretch). You might be better suited just grabbing Jessie from here: :https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2017-07-05/2017-07-05-raspbian-jessie.zip
Or the NOOBS version from here: https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/NOOBS/images/NOOBS-2017-07-05/NOOBS_v2_4_2.zip

And working through the tutorial on that version instead.

5

Thanks.

If I am going to start from scratch with a new OS would I be better following the motioneye route as per your Octocam? But I am not sure what I am getting with that, is it like a normal pi OS eg with python, browser etc or just a camera system. I don’t have a spare SD card about to try it at the moment.