Making timelapse move from still captures crashed motioneye system.

[wally333]

I've installed motioneye on a Raspberry Pi Zero-W running Raspbian-Stretch using what I've documented here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/motioneye/e-RoEWQvMuI

Just playing around with it using a Picamera NoIR, I turned off movies (although it made some motion capture mp4 videos OK, albeit with too low a frame rate to really call it "video") and just captured 1920x1080 one per second stills with motion trigger.

Seems to work fine.  While "viewing" the stills I clicked the "Timelapse" button and it started making a movie of the captured stills (less than 100), it got to 44% and the system locked up.  I have a monitor and keyboard/mouse hooked up as well as using the web interface so I could verify it was cut the power and restart locked up.

I see two obvious possibilities:

  1) Ran out of memory, the PiZero has only like 512MB

  2) Issue with the Raspbian -Stretch ffmpeg 3.2.x vs the recommended 3.1.1-1 deb install.

I don't need to ever actually do this, but thought it worth reporting.

[wally333]

Seems there was a third possibility.

I believe this is a manifestation of the "heavy WiFi use" issue:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/motioneye/1Nw3xn7SBB8

That likely makes the Pizero-W and Pi3 WiFi unsuitable for motioneye without external WiFi hardware until a firmware fix becomes available (if ever).

I got suspicious when Microcenter put PiZero-W on sale for $5, but I did buy another :)

[wally333]

I've installed Motioneye again to a Pi2 with WiPi USB WiFi dongle and configured to match the PiZero-W.  I then repeated the make timelapse.  It completed the movie and downloaded as expected.

Time will tell if this is the solution to the PiZero-W and Pi3 WiFi chip reliability issues -- use a different WiFi chip.  Not optimum but if motioneye network connection is not reliable its pretty much useless.