Motion Tutorial?

First of all you must be sure your generic webcam will work with motion. I have a pi with pi camera - works OK. Plugged in USB generic camera - that one won't work at all even thought the original one still does. Also check your video devices /dev/video? and /dev/v4l (for usb attached)

Yes, I have a working motion.conf - works with Pi camera. Too long to post here.

I have 10 working Pi's with a mix of picams and various usb cams. I can send you a working (for me) motion.conf if you like.

lsusb can see the camera, but fswebcam times out before anything useful happens.

ffmpeg -f v4l2 -video_size 640x480 -i /dev/video0 -frames 1 test.jpg returns a picture, but the exposure is way off.

Sure, send me your motion.conf file. The email address in my From header is valid. I think I was assuming that motion.conf was just a small piece of the puzzle. Was I wrong?

Did you ever get this working?

I had to conclude that my old generic USB webcam was having very poor relations with my Pi and/or Motion, so I have surrendered for now. I did make a couple of attempts to acquire an official Pi camera, but the only ones I could find were at Amazon at extremely inflated prices.

I haven't used Motion but I have streamed USB webcams before. I was wondering what codec you used on the RasPi? I often stream using ffmpeg/RTSP on an MBP I have at home but that uses a hardware-accelerated x264 decoder. I guess at low resolution this isn't an issue?