View/Search Raw Footage

This server automatically creates AVI movies when it detects motion in a possum box. This page allows you to download these movies. Simply select the box(es) and range of dates you are interested in above, click "Show Files", and you'll get a listing of the movies available, with links to the AVI files. Before rushing off to download a whole heap of movies, bear in mind that this page is mainly intended for personal use via the local network and isn't really suitable for public consumption. There are two main reasons for this:

• Firstly, these movies are unfiltered and unedited. What normally happens is that a possum will remain in a box for the entire day and will quite frequently wake up for short intervals to groom. You might get up to 50 movies created in a day, nearly all of which consist of a few minutes of a possum scratching itself and then curling up into a ball. It's not enthralling stuff. Also, sometimes geckos and various insects will crawl over the camera and set off the motion detection.

  
  

• Secondly, the uplink speed from this server is at best 1 Mb/sec and may often be considerably less. Everything I do on line shares this bandwidth, and some things (torrents, VPNs etc.) are real bandwidth hogs. Under ideal conditions, a 10 MB file might take you a couple of minutes to download, but it's quite likely the time will blow out to tens of minutes; and bear in mind that most files are considerably larger than 10 MB.

  
  

You are still welcome to download whatever you want, but the above two facts mean that you could spend a great deal of time for very little profit if you're not careful.

Normally, I will view these movies locally and if I find anything unusual, I will add a brief comment indicating this. If there's something of special interest, I will edit the movie (if appropriate) and load it to the "highlights" page.

A few other comments:

• Since there can be up to 50 files created per box, per day, I've limited the maximum time interval you can select to around a month.

  
  

• The time-zone used for the dates is GMT+1000 (i.e. local time for this server), this means that if you are virtually anywhere else in the world, it's possible you may see movies dated some time in the future. This is not an error. This server is in fact time-synchronised via NTP and all time stamps will be accurate to the nearest second.

  
  

• Each movie file has a "time period" shown on the list. This is the time interval between the start and end of recording for that movie. The actual length of the movie may in some cases be less than this because periods of inaction may be skipped within a movie.

  
  

• Not all of the movies are the same format. Initially I spent some time experimenting with different codecs, frame rates and sizes etc. Any movies dated earlier than Jan 2009 may therefore be low quality, excessively large, unplayable or faulty in some other way.

  
  

• The codec currently in use is what Motion/ffmpeg refer to as "msmpeg4" and has a FourCC of "MP42". This can supposedly be played by Windows Media Player without installing any extra codecs. I personally use VLC Media Player which plays just about anything. I would suggest that if you can't get the movies to play, try installing VLC rather than mucking around trying to find codecs.