Streaming USB webcam to the web with motion on Ubuntu 14.04

After trying to use mjpg_streamer and failing (my webcam doesn’t have hardware support to output mjpg streams) I used “motion” instead.

You can use the “motion” program to stream/export a USB webcam to the web.


sudo apt-get install motion


Edit the configuration file located in /etc/default/motion
to the following:

start_motion_daemon=yes


Then edit the /etc/motion/motion.conf file file as follows:

Set width and height appropriately (640×480 in my case).
Adjust framerate if you want.
I set minimum_motion_frames to 2 because I have a higher framerate.

webcam_quality 85

webcam_localhost off
webcam_port 8080
webcam_motion on
webcam_maxrate 5
control_port 0

Start things up with
sudo service motion start

And then double check things by pointing your web browser to 127.0.0.1:8080.