4 port USB frame grabbers

[SpareTimeGizmos]

Can anyone recommend a 4 port USB frame grabber that works with ZM? I've found a couple that are attractive (or at least cheap) -

• The VideoSecu 4 (about $38)
  The the 4eyeGrab (about $78)

but I've no idea whether they work with Linux or even what chip(s) are in these gizmos. BTW, email me if you want the URLs for these devices - the ZM forum software won't let me include them in this posting!

I know there are lots of USB cameras and lots of USB TV dongles that work with V4L and presumably ZM, but I have six cameras that I need to connect. A single channel USB dongle is not going to cut it - even with four ports, I'll need two of them.

Thanks!
Bob

[SpareTimeGizmos]

I've found a couple that are attractive (or at least cheap)

Found another one - the CL-UVAA-4CH, as little as $6 (wow!!!) on eBay, shipped from HK. There are actually several, the CVSA-409, the Swan SW-241, and more that are probably all the same ICs inside.

Bob

[SpareTimeGizmos]

After more surfing, it looks like the EasyCap002 is the only way to go - there's a somewhat active (one poor guy is doing all the work!) driver project on SourceForge and some people have had some success getting it to work with ZM. However even the driver's author says, when speaking of ZM, "... it can be tricky to configure..." Not super encouraging, but you can pick up one of the dongles on Amazon for about $9.

It also appears that using even two of them at one time on the same USB is dubious, because of the lame hardware - it always captures and sends 30fps no matter what. The driver discards the unused frames, but the USB bandwidth is sucked up just the same.

If anybody has any comments, experience or hints about the EasyCap, I'd still love to hear about it.

Bob

[wkulecz]

I'm using 4 single camera USB capture devices with zoneminder. They are K-World USB2800D, about $25 each from NewEgg.

Work very well. They have composite and S-Video. I tried using them as dual cameras switching inputs but the overhead of switching barely allowed 3 fps. When using composite and S-Video on a BT8x8 PCI card for two cameras it works a lot better usually ~12 fps.

For my purposes 5 fps or above is fine.

Cheap is good, but at some point its cheaper to just buy something that works.

I am using also using these with gstreamer for a real time image processing application and on some computers there are USB issues where only one will work unless the other is plugged into a non motherboard USB port -- showstopper when using a notebook without PCMCIA. But my computer at home running ZM does not have this issue at all, not sure what is going on here.


Sensoray makes a nice four channel USB capture box (USB powered!) that installs as four /dev/video once you compile their driver, but it costs about $500 Got one for the above notebook system at work, they'd be great for ZM is the price was lower. Its model 2255S.

[chr1s]

Hey,

I am very interested to get analog cams viewable at ZoneMinder. Due to I am using a HP MicroServer with "only" low profile place for PCI Express cards, I have to find an other solution for that.

Have anyone experience with other USB converters? Or maybe a hint for a analog to ip-cam converter?

My analog cams arent much expensive, but I got 8 of them, so I not want to thousand of euros...

Thanks & Greetings from germany,
chr1s