Learning blog

HOWTO: Automatically create video clips using motion detection in a Y-cam IP camera

May 8th, 2009 by Greg Innes

Taking what we have learned from HOWTO: Create video clips on demand for local hard disk storage using the Y-cam IP camera we can take it a step further.

How about instead of manually creating video clips each time we have the camera create them automatically when it detects motion? Sounds like that kind of thing would be useful eh? Well it’s very simple to set up so let’s take a look at how it is done.

This guide is suitable for the following Y-cam models:

Y-cam White
Y-cam Black
Y-cam Knight

HOWTO:

Rememeber that the video clips created by the camera can only be stored to the local hard disk of the machine viewing the live image. Videos cannot be sent by email or to an FTP sever.

Also, this video clip function relies on ActiveX so it will only work using Internet Explorer.

Step 1 – Log into your camera

Using your administrator username and password, log into your Y-cam as normal. From the splash page (shown above) select ‘live view’ and you will be taken to the live view interface of your camera, as shown below:

Step 2 – Setting the default location for recordings

To access the video clip settings click the ‘wrench’ icon. This will allow you to choose the location for your video recordings.

In the ‘Record Path:’ box you will notice it has chosen a default recording location. This is normally the ‘My Videos’ folder in the ‘My Documents’ area of your PC. If you wish to choose your own location click the ‘Browse…’ button and choose your folder.

Note there are some other buttons here too:

The ‘Open:’ button will just open your recording folder as specified in the ‘Record Path:’ you have just set (above). Consider it a shortcut to all your recordings.

If you want to limit the file size of your captured video you can here too by entering the value, in MB, in the ‘Max Record Video File Size:’ field. There is no value for unlimited, you have to enter a number between 1MB and 9999MB.

Step 3 – Enabling motion detection

To start recording your clips based on motion you need to first take a look at your motion detection settings.

From the ‘settings’ menu, choose ‘Motion Detection’ under the ‘Alarm’ heading. You should see a screen like the one shown below:

This is the motion detection settings page in the camera which allows you to configure up to 5 motion detection windows. By default none of the windows are activated, therefore motion detection is disabled.

To get the camera to detect based on motion you first need to enable at least 1 motion detection window. To do this put a checkmark next to ‘Window 1′ and this will enable motion detection for the first window, which by default it the full image. This is fine for the purposes of our example but you can fine-tune motion detection windows and sensitivity settings late to suit your requirements.

Click apply to save the motion detection settings.

Step 4 – Activating recordings based on motion

Now that motion detected is activated the final stage is to enable automatic video clip creation using motion detection.

This is very simple. From the live view page select the ‘wrench’ icon to open the video clip recording settings:

From the settings put a check in the box ‘Record video file when alarm presents’ box to activate automatic recording. You can also specify how long you want the video to record after it has detected movement by adjusting the time ‘Record for X second(s) when alarm presents.

FINISH

And that’s it. Now sit back and watch all your video clip files start to fill your chosen directory.

If you have any questions or feedback please leave your comments below.