Although people have been toying with USB webcams on the Raspberry Pi for some time now, the release of the official camera module has reinvigorated interest in video related projects.
The official Raspberry Pi camera module is a Full HD camera that plugs into the Raspberry Pi via the Camera Serial Interface (next to the Ethernet port) on the device. The sensor on the camera is a 5MP with fixed focus lens. It can shoot still images with a maximum resolution of 2592×1944 as well as Full HD 1080p video @ 30 FPS and 720p video @ 60 FPS.
We are big fans of Motion here at MTE and have previously featured an extensive tutorial on the utility. Motion offers several features over the Python script, such as the ability to monitor it from the local network.
If you decide to use the motion app instead of the Python script, remember that the standard motion packages doesn’t yet work with the Raspberry Pi camera. You’ll instead have to use a special binary, called “motion-mmal”, specially created for the Raspberry Pi by a community member.
