[FFmpeg-user] FFMpeg question on Raspberry Pi

[Adam Nielsen]

>      I need help in trying to develop a security camera for a remote 
> area of a farm.  There is no internet in some places there and some of 
> the motion videos may be long, e.g., 20 to 30 minutes.
> 
>      So, I would like to be able to record these longer motion videos on 
> a Raspberry Pi locally, concatenate them and then be able to somehow 
> quickly review the compilation/concatenated video on a video player and 
> then download the snippet(s) of video to a smart phone.

You're going to have to do a fair bit of programming/scripting to get
this I suspect, as I don't think there's anything around that can do
this out of the box on a Pi.

However, since you won't want to use an SD card for this (as writing
all the video will kill the SD card very quickly) you'll probably need
to use a USB external hard drive.  In this case you could just buy two,
and swap them over when you visit the camera.  Then back on another
computer you can flick through the video on the USB hard drive.

>  1.     Recording motion using Motion or MotionEyes to a particular
>     directory for the day,
>  2.     Then using FFMpeg to possibly automatically concatenate the
>     videos in that directory into one bigger file, and
>  3.     Then using a video player to scroll through the video and
>     download a particular segment to my iPhone.

Have you considered using a game camera instead of a Raspberry Pi?  They
have motion sensors built in, they'll capture video of the motion, and
save each event as a different video file.  Then you can visit it, swap
over the memory card, and watch all the videos on any device you can
plug the card into (even a smartphone if you have a card reader for
it).  They run off batteries and include infrared lights to capture
video at night, so they are well suited for remote areas where you
don't need a live video feed.

The only real benefit of using the Pi would be that you get
Ethernet/WiFi on it for remote access/live video, but if you won't be
using that because it's too far away from a WiFi network and you don't
want to use WiFi extenders or dig a cable, using a game camera will
probably save you a huge amount of effort.

Cheers,
Adam.