I’ve started leaving my webcam on as a motion detector to find out who is leaving the shopping cards on our lawn, and ultimately have found it useful to stitch the images together into a movie. There are several ways to do this - and my way maybe isn’t the best - but it works for me.

I first installed and configured motion, which I’ve used for years. I then created a file in ~/.motion called motion.com:

$ cat ~/.motion/motion.conf

height 480
width 640
framerate 2

By creating this file, it allows me to start motion without modifying the global motion.conf file permissions, or gasp running it under sudo. There are lots of options you can put in your motion.com file.

With motion installed, and configured, now install mencoder.

I prefer to generate a seed file based on the creation date for each image. If you try to use mencoder with just a *.jpg, it works, but my video jumped around.

$ pwd
/home/path/Desktop/motion
$ ls -rt *.jpg > list.txt

This list.txt file now has the filenames, in chronological order, ready for consumption. I create the video like so:

mencoder mf://@list.txt -o `date +%G%m%d`.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg

This will output a file with today’s date in a few seconds. Remember, the `’s are the key by the #1, not quotes.