Motion Not Honoring movie_codec Setting

[u2n]

Encountered this when changing configs and no tweak or workaround has been found so asking here.

Current documentation says movie_codec is: "Container/Codec to be used for the video," with mkv as the default.

Using with movie_passthrough on and netcam_high_url set, documentation states the stream will be "processed into the movie file without going through the decode/encode processing." Further assurance of this (with the accompanying lower CPU usage) is given in the following few lines.

Before enabling passthrough and highres (the old name), mkv files were output as expected. After, it doesn't matter whether mkv is specified explicitly or left to default, the wrapper used is mp4, not mkv.

Trivial, because the video part is interchangeable with either format? Well, yes, except in my case the audio stream is pcm_alaw, which comes thru fine with mkv but is not supported at all in mp4.

For reference, ffmpeg does a fine (and instantaneous) job putting the rtsp stream segments into mkv containers, incl the audio as-supplied (-c copy).

So does this highlight a bug? Or at least a discrepancy between the documentation and program?

For now I'm batch renaming the mp4 files to mkv before playing (w/ no audio). Motion does such a great job at what it does, it'd be nice to see this fixed.

TLDR:
With particular configs (and hardware), Motion's behavior making movies is inconsistent with current documentation.

• Motion changes the default output file format (mkv) to mp4 without asking.
• Even when reaffirming the default format in config file, mkv is ignored and mp4 is used.
• Once corrected, the mkv movies should not have the audio stripped out (since added CPU load is negligible).

[Mr-Dave]

Motion changes the default output file format (mkv) to mp4 without asking.

Actually I think that there is a log message indicating that pass through mode is enabled and it is changing to MP4

To your main point. Yes, MP4 was the required container for passthrough mode in version 4.7 and prior.

[u2n]

Thanks, @Mr-Dave, for the info and link, and of course for all your work here. (Mea culpa for not including v.4.7.1-1 and LMDE faye/bookworm.)

There it is, mp4, which I didn't see while hyper-focused on the system log rather than motion's. (A note on that at the end.)

As mp4 was the obvious choice In earlier times, I'm guessing it remains the forced option in code by heritage. it's limited flexibility, in this case, prohibits audio stream inclusion, which mkv would accommodate.

Without a grand discussion on the merits of each (lol), it's clear that some may prefer a soundless, smaller file size while others (like me) don't care about size and really want the audio.

To that end, moving always in the direction of improvement, is this an update that might be added to the next major release? That would bring motion's behavior into compliance with the guide.

Motion itself is flexible enough, with start/stop script calls, that workarounds are not too difficult. But a functional movie_codec setting with passthru enabled would be much better.

Last note on system log (ref above), many fixes tried but still getting 3 errors/min on 'ffmpeg permission denied'. (Ref here but only info is "...issue is resolved.")

[Mr-Dave]

In V5 pass through mode will do mov, mkv and mp4. (There are however still some remaining PTS/DTS problems that occasionally pop up that I've not resolved).

Regarding the 'ffmpeg permission denied', review your log. This is all specific to the individual setup not Motion. The log message in that issues shows the following...
[1:ml1:Facade] [ERR] [ENC] [Mar 25 13:23:16] ffmpeg_set_outputfile: Permission denied. /mnt/element/Facade_002_2024-03-25_13-23-16.mkv: Permission denied
which indicates the user running Motion does not have the linux permissions to write a file to /mnt/element/ so the resolution is to either change the permissions of that directory so that the user running Motion can write to it or to change the directory where the files are to be stored.

[u2n]

Great to know it's already done, thank you. Marked your post as the answer.

Then last on this: Any link to the 5.0 download? If still in beta, I'd be happy to test.

(To keep from going OT, I'll submit a new question on permissions.)

[robert-brown19]

I was surprised at how easy it was to [Installing and building from source] (https://motion-project.github.io/motionv5_build.html)
I am up and running on a PI4 with local camera. Having some issues with RTMP stream to netcam but my setup complexity is significantly greater via RTMP and I have not had enough time to pare down the issues