after finally getting myself a capture card (bt878, one chip, 4 inputs) i've installed ZM and it works perfectly. Right now i'm using 2 cams to become familiar with it.
Right from the beginning i had some really strange problems for which i couldn't find any solution in the FAQ, the docs or here in the forum. So i'll describe it and the solution just in case it might be helpfull for others.
At first i defined 1 monitor, configured it as NTSC as this was the only way to get a picture with 'xawtv'. Everything was working w/o problems. After defining a 2. one, i still had live streams, but the pictures seemed to be flickering in the upper third part. At first i thought that this were some kind of 'out-of-sync' frames, but soon it came to my attention that everytime it flickerd, the stream was jumping a few frames backward, then forward again, then backward again. Like 3 steps forward, 2 steps backward.
I played with ringbuffer, framerates, shared memory, etc but to no avail. As soon as a 2. monitor was defined, the mess began and i lost some hair
To make sure that this was no problem with the hardware, i installed a win98 to try the original 'security' software which came together with the capture card. To my surprise everything was working fine. With one difference: With Windows i had to define the cameras as PAL to get a picture. When configured as NTSC there was only garbage.
To get ZM running, i had to define the cams with "DEVICE-FORMAT = 3", AUTO
Well, to make a long story short, it's working now
Many thanks for this product
Uli