MotionEye Timelapse Capture

It’s been a while since I had my last automated time-lapse solution, and since the change of location and change of servers the setup has been lost in the ether.

Back then, it was achieved with an off the shelf IP Camera, a Windows Server share and a batch script. Now that the Linux / Raspberry Pi CCTV solution is up and running, I hope to re-instate the automated time lapse in a simpler way using MotionEye and Cent OS.

Capture Setup

Beginning with the image capture, which is setup much in the same way as any other MotionEye Server setup.

On the Pi, set the camera up as a Fast Network Camera then add it to the server as a network camera.

In the Preference options, choose Still Images from the capture options. I find a 20 second interval for skyline capture a good balance between smoothness of video and speed of changes.

Do not change the filename template as this needs to match the script.

Images only need to be stored for one day, as the converted video will not be subject to the file removal.

Finally, on the web GUI, make a note of the File Storage path, this will help with the next step.

Video Setup

Log into the server via SSH and navigate to the directory that contains the Camera folders

ls /cctv

Create a new folder for the video output

mkdir Timelapse

Now navigate back to your home directory

cd

Create a new script file

nano timelapse.sh

Paste the following into the new text document, replacing with your parameters

cd /cctv/Camera3/ &&
cd "$(\ls -1dt ./*/ | head -n 1)" && cat *.jpg | ffmpeg
-framerate 25 -f image2pipe -vcodec mjpeg -i - -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 9999999
-qscale:v 0.1 -f avi /cctv/Timelapse/"timelapse_`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`.avi"

Where /cctv/Camera3/ is the images saved from the camera
and /cctv/Timelapse/ is the time-lapse directory just created.

Save the script and exit with

Ctrl & O
Ctrl & X

Make the script executable with

chmod +x timelapse.sh

If there are images ready in todays folder, you can test the script by running this from the home directory.

./timelapse.sh

Next let’s create a trigger to run this script automatically

crontab -e

Enter the following in the new nano screen

58 23 * * * /root/timelapse.sh

This instructs the system to run the script at 23:58 every day

Save the cron and exit with

Ctrl & O
Ctrl & X

It’s now set, time to wait until the next day to see if it has run!