detecting motion and recording

[owencollins-star]

I have motion running successfully on a raspberry pi and can stream the camera to a browser
what I can't do is detect and capture motion to record it
I have tried various settings int the conf file but have some questions
I've set the
threshold 500
and danced around with no joy

movie_output on

i have tried different target_dir values including
/
home/piuser
/home/piuser/
and many others, where does the file go when created as I haven't found one

i've tried
emmulate_motion on

do i need values for
on_event_start
or
on_event_stop

any help would be appreciated
thanks in andavnce

[Mr-Dave]

You would need to look at the log messages. First specify log_level 7 in the configuration then either specify a file in the configuration e.g. log_file /home/yourid/whereever.log or stop Motion from running as a service (sudo systemctl stop motion) and then start Motion in a terminal with no log file specified in the configuration.

Then you can look at the messages from Motion to determine what is happening and how to fix it.

[owencollins-star]

thanks for the support Mr Dave
I've tried changing the log_level to 7 and adding the log_file value to your suggestion (with my id) and / and other variants
once i put any log_file value in I couldn't start motion even after starting, stopping and enabling motion
once removed it worked again but no logfiles were created.
it feels like a permissions issue but I have no evidence for that

any other suggestions welcomed

[owencollins-star]

ps i tried running

motion -d 7 -l /home/pieuser/Documents/log.txt
and I get this......

log.txt

[Mr-Dave]

Typically you would not want to use the directory / as the storage location. As shown in the log entry
[1:ml1] [ERR] [ENC] [Dec 11 20:15:00] ffmpeg_set_outputfile: Permission denied. //0-01-20251211201500.mkv: Permission denied the user running motion does not have the permissions to write files there.

Something like /home/pieuser/Documents should work.