A couple years back I bought a wireless security camera, an AXIS 1034-W, and dida halfass setup using the ancient linux program “motion” to do the heavy work of recording video. I just revisited all this using the on-board features of the camera itself and it’s so much better. This product is obsolete; the newer Axis M1065-LW looks better in lots of ways and some of these notes probably don’t apply. And there’s a whole world of other manufacturers making security cameras, but for me anything with cloud based video uploading like NestCam is a non-starter.
The hurdle is this old camera is really designed to be configured in MSIE, with ActiveX controls (no really) and a Java applet (I know, I know!). Once I got IE 11 fired up it got a whole lot easier to set up the camera. You literally can’t configure the motion detection without running Java. Dumb!
Anyway I’m not going to document everything I did. But the basic thing was to enable audio recording (off by default for some reason), then set up a “quality” stream profile to capture 1280×800 H.264 with audio. Then I configured the image motion detection to trigger on very small objects (ie: far away from the camera) and set up an action for it to record any detected motion to an SMB share on the local network.
End result is pretty good. The main drawback of this camera model is it doesn’t illuminate the scene nor record with infrared. So it doesn’t work very well in the dark. Newer models do. It does have a passive infrared sensor for motion detection but it doesn’t seem to work well enough.