I've been trying to solve this problem for a while

Motion is great for one or two cameras, but changes take a while and viewing the output is hard. However I really like motioneye:

https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneye/wiki

it works well on a pi and is basically a nice gui for motion (with the ability to paint motion masks in the browser, which is a very nice touch)

the only down side is that video viewing isn't supported directly in the browser, but that might change if someone is willing to help out.