BTTV Capture card

[skydiver]

I have a 4 chip/8 input Bttv capture card running in Ubuntu server ZM in a VMWARE VM with the PCI card passed through to the VM. This card support sdual cameras on each /dev/videoX input.

All primary channels work great and captures video. When I add a second camera /video0(1) both the primary /dev/video0(0) and the secondary lose video.

I have both sources set as follows:
Device channels set to 0 & 1 respectively
Captures per frame set to 2
Multi Buffering set to yes

In Options/Config I have set:
V4L_MULTI_BUFFER = Checked
CAPTURES_PER_FRAME = 2

I have had this setup working n the past before I virtualized the server. I have been running ZM off and one for almost 10 years now so I know this hardware will work but every setting tweak I have tried has not worked. Any suggestions?

[SteveGilvarry]

Are you using a new kernel? Some talk of cards not working in modern kernels, maybe this is one of the symptoms, hopefully someone running one will chime in.

[knight-of-ni]

I'm very surprised vmware's passthrough works at all with that old card.

Since you've had this card for a while, you probably know that the bttv driver will not autodetect your card properly.
You've got to manually configure the driver with a config file placed under /etc/modprobe.d
Did you copy the config file, from the original working system, over to the vm?

If you can get the card working fine on physical hardware but cannot in a virtual environment after configuring the card then I'd say its time to look for a different solution. An IP Video Encoder would solve your problem.

[skydiver]

I may not have clearly explained myself. The card is working with all 4 channel 0 inputs. It is only when I add a second camera to the chip input on channel 1 that then both channels stop working. I believe it has to due with selecti9ng the correct image for each camera out of the video stream.

[knight-of-ni]

I may not have clearly explained myself. The card is working with all 4 channel 0 inputs. It is only when I add a second camera to the chip input on channel 1 that then both channels stop working. I believe it has to due with selecti9ng the correct image for each camera out of the video stream.

I understood what you described, and I've seen exactly those symptoms when one has not configured the bttv driver.
So back to the question I asked previously, did you do that? Configuring the bttv driver by hand is not optional.

[skydiver]

I appear to have everything working now.

I have 5 cameras installed running at 640 x 480 8 bit greyscale the following settings:
- Analysis FPS 15
- Maximum FPS 5
- Alarm Maximum FPS 10
Multi Buffering set to Use Config Value

Here is what I changed to get dual cameras working:
- Added a second cpu core to the server
- Turned off V4L_MULTI_BUFFER
- Reduced source/buffers Stream Replay Image Buffer to 200 from 500

I have cables run for 3 more cameras around the house to max the input at 8.

For full background of my hardware:
- I have an 8 core AMD FX CPU running at 4.018 GHz and 32 GB Ram on the host running on a Gigabyte Desktop Motherboard.
- I have dedicated 4GB RAM to the zm server and now 2 CPU cores.
- Currently running a Windows Home Server Instance with 8 x 3 TB drives connected to an LSI HBA adapter passed through from VMWARE 5.5 for my media and file services in windows using Stable Bit Drive Pool.

So Far VMWARE and zm seem very stable even passing through the video card. I did have to change from a PCI video card to a PCIE x1 video card due the VMWARE wanting to take the entire PCI bus for pass through of the BTTV card. Once the card was set to pass trough to VMWARE, when I added the video channels to the zm server, I was able to select each channel individually, so I could theoretically use the inputs across multiple VM's.

This video card has served me well for over 12 years now. I would like to upgrade to higher resolution cameras and capture but I am on a budget. My server has been a slow labor of love over the past 3 years.
Hope this helps others out there.

[knight-of-ni]

Cool. glad you got it working. Didn't know they made video cards that fit into a x1 PCIE slot.

[skydiver]

Here is the card I added to move my DVI card off the PCI bus so I could reserve the whole bus for the VMWARE passthrough.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01E9 ... UTF8&psc=1

I now have another slot to be able to add another capture card. I also think with this video card I may be able to use it for another kodi or plex media player.