Supported hardware

Supported Hardware

Motion runs on x64, i386 and ARM platforms using a variety of distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOs, FreeBSD, MacOS, etc. The cameras supported for each platform depend upon the distribution.

For web cameras, Motion uses v4l2, webcamd and Brooktree drivers. These are available on the majority of the distributions. For MacOS, web cameras use the AVFoundation drivers and those are not supported by Motion.

For network cameras, Motion supports multiple formats using the ffmpeg libraries. The camera protocols supported include MJPG, RTSP and RTMP.

The official Raspberry PI camera is also supported by Motion using either the Raspbian V4L2 camera module or by using the MMAL camera driver.

It is recommended that you first get the camera working with a regular video player such as ffplay before beginning to configure it with Motion.