For a while now, I have been thinking about putting together a video surveillance system at home, based on linux, webcams and python. I’m aware that out of the box systems exist, but I wanted to create something more personalised, which, let’s face it, it’s more fun! 🙂
After reading a bit online, I decided to use a command-line tool to grab frames from my webcams. There is a little program called “streamer” which allows you to save frames from the various webcams as jpegs (or videos if you like). In ubuntu type
sudo apt-get install streamer
to install it and then something like:
streamer -q -c /dev/video1 -b 32 -s 1600×1200 -o outfile.jpeg