Quickstart

The following commands demonstrate some common use cases for DVR-Scan. You can also use dvr-scan --help for a complete listing of all options, or see the Command-Line Reference. Note that the default program settings can be overriden by creating a user config file.

To perform motion detection on video.mp4, creating a new video for each motion event:

dvr-scan -i video.mp4

The output files will be placed in the current working directory (the location you are running DVR-Scan from). To save all output files in to a particular location, use -d/--output-dir:

dvr-scan -i video.mp4 -d extracted_events/

To only perform detection on part of the frame, use the -roi flag:

dvr-scan -i video.mp4 -roi

To draw a box around the areas of the frame containing motion:

dvr-scan -i video.mp4 -bb

To use ffmpeg to extract motion events, set -m/--output-mode to ffmpeg (or copy to use stream copy mode):

dvr-scan -i video.mp4 -m ffmpeg
dvr-scan -i video.mp4 -m copy

The following section covers all the command-line options which can be used with DVR-Scan, including motion event/detection parameters.