It was cheap and on offer and although it only said Windows / Mac use I thought I would take a chance to get it working under Mint. That BUY NOW button eh !
So first I found Zone Minder, which looks a great program but I had real trouble setting it up so I gave up trying after following a few guides. Something to do with systemd and systemctl I could not figure out.
So I looked for something simpler and I found it.
Motion
I've just started to play with it but I need to get this down before I move on to saving video and using it via my android phone & other places, so the basics of setting it up.
First I found a guide on how to just set up the camera with my router at sensor.org
This was basically connect by ethernet cable to my router
plug the camera in
navigate to my router setup homepage where I found the WPS connection button,
then press the button on the back of the camera and the WPS button on the setup page
The router found the IP camera and I was away.
I found the new connection on the list of active connections on the router info page
copied the internal IP address 192.168.x.x
and pasted it into my browser
This brought up the IP cameras setup page where I entered the supplied username and password
from the manual. The first thing I did was change this and follow the setup from there
keeping the simplest options for now.
I was now ready to install Motion
sudo apt-get install motion
sudo apt-get update
apparently this should automatically create a
motion group (I learnt a bit from trial and error about there from installing Plex !)
it should also add a motion user
This info is on Linux.com at how to operate linux spycams with motion
after making sure this was right I started motion
$: motion
mistake it wouldn't give permission to use
silly me
$: sudo motion
and it started up. I then found it had failed to find the video device
I followed the instructions on Linux.com down to the point where the author talked about
permissions again.
Her name was carla so I noticed she gave the instructions
~$ sudo chown carla:carla .motion/motion.confHer group name was obviously carla and so was her user name.
I replaced the carla with my group name and user name so it all worked.
I followed the info to make more directories then saved localhost:8081 and localhost:8080 to my browser favourites
The first port 8081 is the feed to see the camera output and the second port 8080 is the configuration
file where you can enter and change different set up options.
I went to config then list and all the changable options were there
To see my camera I then went back to the IP Camera's setup page and found the link to the feed by
right clicking on the video feed and using inspect on my chromium browser to pick up the link as shown on Linux.com.
pasting that link into netcam_url =
and then pasting admin:mypassword
into netcam_userpass =
Bang. the feed came up on the hocalhost:8081 webpage
Now I can mess about with other options another day to add functionality
