v4l2loopback and "motion" compatibility

[drJabber]

Could you make "motion" surveillance software support in v4l2loopback module?

now it outputs
[1] Unable to query input 0 VIDIOC_ENUMINPUT: Invalid argument
[1] ioctl (VIDIOCGCAP): Inappropriate ioctl for device
[1] Could not fetch initial image from camera
[1] Motion continues using width and height from config file(s)
[1] Resizing pre_capture buffer to 1 items
[1] ioctl (VIDIOCGPICT): Inappropriate ioctl for device
[1] Failed to open video loopback

[umlaeute]

please explain what you mean by '"motion" surveillance software support'.
and what "it" is, that outputs those things.

anyhow: v4l2loopback's aim is to be a fully v4l2-conformant capture-device (from the consumer point of view); i'll hapiily fix all bugs that exhibit non-standard conformant behaviour. any application that can work with a standards-conformant device should thus work.

however, i will NOT add any code to support a specific application (that makes assumptions on the devices which they ought not make)

[drJabber]

sorry
Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from cameras. It is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion. You can find information about it here: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome
This program uses vloopback kernel module to make a pipe between the camera device (e.g. /dev/video0) to some virtual video device created by vloopback module (e.g. /dev/video8)
But vloopback module uses v4l1 API, which is excluded from last debian and ubuntu distributions. So I just tried to use your v4l2loopback module with motion program. But motion outputs those messages.

Thank you for your explanations, I already understood that it is not a problem of your code, I'll try to ask motion program authors for support of v4l2loopback device.

[umlaeute]

thanks for the further info.

note that i'm not saying that it is not a problem of my code, i'm sure that it is full of bugs.
but it might as well be the problem of the application

and i'm keep getting mails like "skype is not working, please fix it" which is quite annoying (and even more so, since skype/M$ make quite some money, while v4l2loopback has not institutional backing)

[umlaeute]

hmm, i can confirm that "motion-3.2.12" as packaged in debian is not working.

but then i checked out the svn version of motion and the git version and it seems to work just fine with a standard v4l2loopback device. so i think the problem is indeed on the (old verseion of) motion and has been fixed in the meantime.

[drJabber]

Oh! Thank you very much! I saw the discussion about v4l2loopback integration on motion home in 2011 year, but I thought that they still didn't integrate it. I'll try to check git version of motion this eventing and report you if you are interesting about it.

[umlaeute]

sure, it would be nice to have it as a usecase on the wiki