S.C.R.A.P.

SCRAP (Security Camera Recording APplication) is a security camera recording application for Linux.

SCRAP is capable of working with any video4linux YUYV palette compatible device, supporring all API documented features. It can grab frames from multiple inputs of a single device and also support working with multiple capture boards at the same time, giving user the advantage of a low-cost recording system.

It has a very reliable motion detection system, recording only when movement happens and ignoring the rest (including light changes). So, in a typical 24h recording cycle, you will have only a few hours of recorded video.

Videos are recorded using XviD's MPEG-4 compression, witch is one of the best video codecs today. The generated AVIs should be playable on AVI+MPEG4 capable video player (all modern video players are).

There is also a recording archive management system, with alow the user keep archived only the recent recordings, erasing the old ones. User can set to erase recordings older than a number of days, or set a maximum disk usage.

Although SCRAP is a console application, it is full featured. It is intented to be run as a daemon, in the background, letting SCRAP doing the recording job without other systems users even notice it is running.

Download either the source code or the static binary.

The provided binary, should run in ANY Linux 2.4/2.6 x86 system. Just unpack the tar.gz and run. Again, if you find problems, please contact the author.

SCRAP source code should compile in any Linux system with the minimum requirements:

• Tested only on x86 hardware, may work on other architectures.
• GCC
• GNU Make
• GNU Binutils
• Doxygen (needed for building developer documentation, useless to end user)
• txt2tags (needed for building manual page and user's guide)
• GNU C Library (including its development package, libc6-dev in Debian systems)
• XviD, version compatible with API version 4 (eg. XviD 1.0.3)
• Linux kernel headers (from 2.4 or 2.6 series, not tested with 2.2 or older series)

If you find problems compiling it, please, check the minimum requirements, and all of them apply, please, contact the author, you've found a BUG.

Please, read the documentation that comes with the software. It is very complete. There is also a full commented example configuration file that should make it quick to start recording in minutes.

The author currently has no camera to record a sample video. If you have one, you can send it to the autor to publish it here.

Currently, SCRAP depends on video4linux devices capable of working with YUYV color palette. Most WebCams are only RGB capable, and may not work. It is possible to add RGB devices support (implementing color palette conversion on the fly) but there are no plans for when or if to do it.

The current code inserts colons on the file names. This can lead to failures on filesystems that do not support this character, such as FAT, NTFS or SMB shares. There is a patch made by Andrew andrew@gmecm.mine.nu that removes this feature. To apply it:

tar zxf scrap-1.0.0.tar.gz
cd scrap-1.0.0
zcat /path/to/no-colon.patch.gz | patch -p1
./configure
make
make install