Poor man's DVR - a linux bash script to capture images from the camera and upload them to a remote server
I wanted to create a very easy "DVR" script for my raspberry PI machine that will take a shot from the camera and upload the photos to a remote server so I can see what is happening in my living room. I created this simple bash Linux command line script to activate the camera, save the photo, add a timestamp and upload it to a remote server. It is running every minute - capturing 5 photos from the webcam every 9 seconds and uploads them to the server using scp. Here is the shell script for a poor man's DVR: #!/bin/bash # repeat 5 times for i in {1..5}; do # the file name with a datetime stamp filename=webcam_$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).jpg # capture the image from the camera ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -input_format mjpeg -i /dev/video0 -vframes 1 -frames:v 1 /mnt/ramdisk/$filename # wait sleep 9 done # create a latest.jpg image cp /mnt/ramdisk/$filename /mnt/ramdisk/latest.jpg # add the time stamp convert /mnt/ramdisk/latest.jpg -gravity SouthEast -points