![Quintet – boldly fly your starship through the galaxy with your friends [Freeware]](http://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/quintet3-270x190.jpg)
MJPEG Surveillance. Nice free security webcam program comes with motion sensing technology which starts the recording when it senses movement in any particular area of the room. It can handle multiple cameras and can convert the JPEG file stream into a proper WMV, DivX or MPEG4 video clip. Lots of other features too, including video editing and auto video recycling which records over the oldest videos first (useful for keeping hard disk space under control).
My best motion detection algorithm so far, very accurate and very fast. Each frame is split into a 400 block grid, and an average luminance intensity value is calculated for each grid block, the program then compares the previous frame’s values with the current frame’s value, and the entire area which motion has occurred gets highlighted with a red rectangle, which can alter its size and shape to encapsulate the entire motion area. All motion detection and highlighting are done directly in raw memory, with custom direct memory access routines, so speed is drastically increased when compared to typical detection coding methods. This motion detection algorithm is more than 4 times faster, and twice as accurate with detection and image noise canceling than my previous version.
About the Author:
Nigel is the managing editor of the Red Ferret, as well as a freelance columnist for the Sunday Times newspaper in London. Loves tech and fancies himself as a bit of a futurist, but then don't we all?
Nigel – who has written 5161 posts on The Red Ferret Journal.
![buycott3 150x150 Buycott finally theres a guilt free way to shop [Freeware]](http://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/buycott3-150x150.jpg "Buycott - finally there's a guilt free way to shop [Freeware]")
