Cannot get motion 5.0 working

[andrewfrongello]

Hi all, wondering if someone can point me in the right direction. I followed the directions per the motion build guide to create and install from a custom deb package.

1. wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Motion-Project/motion-packaging/master/builddeb.sh
2. reviewing the script, I added 2>/dev/null on lines 32, 33, and 35 to suppress error output on my system that does not have LSB modules installed.
3. everything else looks good so chmod +x and ran script
4. installed the resulting deb package using sudo gdebi {deb package name}

Great, it looks like it completed successfully and the following notes are displayed from the script output:

Adding group 'motion' (GID 123) ...
Adding system user 'motion' (UID 111) ...
Adding new user 'motion' (UID 111) with group 'motion' ...
Not creating home directory '/var/lib/motion'.
Adding user `motion' to group 'video' ...
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/motion.service → /lib/systemd/system/motion.service.

This is where I am getting lost, and I'm a little confused as to which guide I need to be following. I've been playing around with the configs a bit but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get it working. Any help is appreciated.

[arbeaman]

I've been experimenting with motion 5 on a Pi5 with bookworm, libcamera and an arducam Pivariety B0333 (IMX462) camera and I succeeded in getting a good build.

For the documentation, I used the information in the doc directory of the motion github.

I installed the 16 bit (armhf) desktop version of bookworm on the pi5. I had issues with the current 64 version of bookworm with libcamera and my camera so I downgraded to the 16 bit version. The bookworm lite version did not work in my prior tests so I used the desktop version of bookworm (not the full image).

I did the steps you described to build and install the V5 version of the motion deb file.

After the install I did the following steps:

sudo cp /var/lib/motion/motion-dist.conf /var/lib/motion/motion.conf
sudo cp /var/lib/motion/camera1-dist.conf /var/lib/motion/camera1.conf

In motion.conf I set log_level 8, log_file /var/log/motion/motion.log, target_dir /var/lib/motion and deleted the Camera section.

In camera.conf I commented out the netcam_url and added a line with libcam_device camera0 and set the width and height to match my camera.

Because my camera uses libcamera and that requires i2c I had to run sudo usermod -aG i2c motion to add motion to the i2c group, otherwise motion could not find any libcamera cameras.

I ran sudo chown motion:motion /var/lib/motion because the owner showed as root.

I also ran sudo chown motion:motion /var/lib/motion/* because several files had root ownership.

I ran sudo systemctl restart motion then sudo systemctl status motion and saw it was running.

Next I checked /var/log/motion/motion.log for any errors.

Then I went to http://<systemname>:8080/101/mjpg/ and I could see the video.

My full setup is more complex, but I used these steps while getting everything to work.