Mismatched cameras on a PV-183 16 port capture card

[theorganloft]

This is a strange problem on a 16 port pv-183 capture card. I have cameras from 2 different manufacturers on ports \dev\video2(0) and \dev\video2(1). These ports start blue-screening and flicking on and off.

It seems that the events table gets corrupted/confused when capturing in motion detection mode. I have to run a repair on the database, then clear the events for that monitor\camera. The cameras begin to capture and the blue screen goes away. After some time, the process starts again.

The unique thing about this is that the cameras are from different manufacturers. I say this because the other 14 ports do not do this. I even moved these cameras to other ports and the same thing occurs. The odd camera in the group is a less expensive camera I purchased for testing. I am trying to use it to monitor the server room.

I checked the voltage levels at the cameras and played with the capture settings, I looked at the messages and logs and find nothing extraordinary.

Has anyone experienced anything like this?

[robsmiler]

Hello,

using Bluecherry's pv-155 here. Distro ubuntu 7.10. Providing also 16 channels. Yes flickering here, too. Probably because playing around. I am not safe if this is an initialization problem of zm. But it seems...

I fiddled around a lot because I could not get the signals of upper eight cams. With default settings from my distro it was only possible to run 8 cams (/dev/video0...3 [0...1]) when switching 'Device Channel' higher than [1] then strange things happened. Devices listed red in ZM console other cams that worked in low 8 ports started flicker, greyed, interlaced.

After some research I found that /etc/modprobe.d/options needs additional line telling kernel that there are four bttv chips of type 77.

Code: Select all

$ sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/options --> adding
# BTTV card enabling cams 9..16 for bluecherry pv-155
options bttv gbuffers=16 card=77,77,77,77

Other sources told it should be type 98 (which was default and listed in dmesg without addition). But only 77 seems to let address the higher 8 cams.

Ok - and every now and then when plugging / unplugging cams the monitors started again flickering and could get stopped only, if shutting down machine completely. After reboot pictures got cleared. But not every time.

/var/log/messages include following messages:

Code: Select all

May 24 18:21:49 zonex zmwatch[5772]: INF [Restarting capture daemon for 7141_1, shared memory not valid]

I'm quite confident, that this is going along with card type change.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

rob*

[theorganloft]

It seems there are others that experience this too. See this:

http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11742