ZoneMinder Forums

Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but here goes...

I want to get something straight. On the list of the devices supported, there are cameras and capture cards. I assume if I have a compatible capture card, I don't also need a compatible camera? Any camera that plugs into the card will do?

There are loads of cheap cards on Ebay claiming to be for use in PC based surveillance systems, here is one of them:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... %3AIT&rd=1

It says it is Linux compatible, anyone any experience of these?

Thanks.

Hi,

I have created a new forum, and moved this message to it, for hardware queries. I don't have any experience of this card myself but if it is BT878 (or BT848) chipset based then it _should_ work. It appears to only have a single chipset on it so you might get 25fps for one input dropping to maybe 3fps for all four.

If you do have a compatible video card then you are correct in that any video source that produces output that the card can read can be used. In general the cameras list only includes either USB or network cameras that do not produce a raw video output.

Phil,

yes it works .. all inputs
the only problem is with redhat or fedora. modprobe stuks for 5 minutes untill load the card.

I have one of these cards as well. I also have to wait a while for the bttv module to load. I think if I could figure out how specify the card type and that it has no tuner it would load quicker. Does anyone know how to do this?

To persuade bttv what type of card you have, use an 'options bttv' line in /etc/modules.conf. Below is what I use for my SV823A which has four onboard BT878 chips, hence four sets of numbers:

options bttv card=0,0,0,0 tuner=5,5,5,5 pll=1,1,1,1

card=0 tells it to auto-detect the card
tuner=5 tells it no tuner
pll=1 means use PAL (as opposed to NTSC etc.)

I am using one of these cheap cards purchased over e-bay for $USD9.95. What driver is everyone using? Through trial and error I settled on loading bttv with card=7 tuner=4. In the bttv card list this is a MATRIX-Vision MV-Delta.
I got around the slow load problem by putting this into my options file:
options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1.
It now loads immediately.

what do you guys get for Frames per second on those cards?