Multiple Multi-port BTTV cards

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cste005
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2004 2:36 am

Multiple Multi-port BTTV cards

Post by cste005 »

I've got an IVC-200 card:

http://en.ieiworld.com/products/index.a ... uctsID=508

Which works great, problem is it seems very hungry on system resources, i.e. IRQ's and it's not willing to share them or atleast i can't make it. It takes 4 IRQ's to run it. I tried to put another BTTV card in, just a plain TV tuner as i've got 5 cameras and when I do this it causes the IVC-200 to need to share IRQ's and this stops some of the channels working on the 4 port card.

Has anyone got any ideas on how to make this configuration work?

Cheers
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fernando
Posts: 240
Joined: Thu Jul 10, 2003 6:00 pm

Re: Multiple Multi-port BTTV cards

Post by fernando »

that card uses four 878 chips.. 30 to 25 fps per channel.
the information i got is that you cant use more then one of those card. sinse you got 4 chip linux take them has 4 cards..
are good in linux? if you do "zmu -d 0 -q -v" how many channels tell you?
you can use the relays .. that relays sre conected to the gpio of the first 878 chip.
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zoneminder
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Joined: Wed Jul 09, 2003 2:07 pm
Location: Bristol, UK
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Re: Multiple Multi-port BTTV cards

Post by zoneminder »

Hi Fernando,

I have a system with one LML foure port card and one Spectra8 in and they both work ok, even though they are both four port full rate cards. I'm not sure they really do use one IRQ per chanel I would expect them to share the IRQ and just use a different port address but I don't know for sure. The only difficulty I've had is passing different options to the drivers as it's not easy (or possible?) to give card specific options to the drivers in modules.conf. If you had two (or more) of the same type of card that wouldn't be a problem though.

Phil,
cste005
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2004 2:36 am

Re: Multiple Multi-port BTTV cards

Post by cste005 »

Sorry for the longish post...but it appears that it only has a single channel, i thought that the GPIO module only did in and out for motion detection, rather than video signal, but i might be wrong there.

I'm now playing with an ATI all in wonder which has a video in, but the gatos drivers are proving to be a real mission to get working at the moment with fedora.

It looks like the card is reasonably happy to share irq's with an ethernet card, but not another bttv card, atleast that is what it seems at the moment.

[root@barbrady root]# zmu -d 0 -q -v
Video Capabilities
Name: BT878(IVC-200)
Type: 233
Can capture
Overlay onto frame buffer
Can clip
Uses the frame buffer memory
Scalable
Video Channels: 1
Audio Channels: 0
Maximum Width: 924
Maximum Height: 576
Minimum Width: 48
Minimum Height: 32
Window Attributes
X Offset: 0
Y Offset: 0
Width: 320
Height: 240
Picture Atributes
Palette: 4 - 24bit RGB
Colour Depth: 24
Brightness: 32768
Hue: 32768
Colour :32512
Contrast: 27648
Whiteness: 0
Channel 0 Attributes
Name: Composite0
Channel: 0
Flags: 2
Channel has audio
Type: 2 - Camera
Format: 0 - PAL

[root@barbrady root]# cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0
0: 221923 XT-PIC timer
1: 502 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 25998 XT-PIC bttv
8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
10: 25843 XT-PIC bttv
11: 25988 XT-PIC bttv
12: 947 XT-PIC PS/2 Mouse
14: 20641 XT-PIC ide0
15: 26470 XT-PIC eth0, bttv
NMI: 0
ERR: 0
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