ImpactVCB nearly working

mhamel · Post by **mhamel** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 8:46 am

Long time lurker here, finally getting to do a ZoneMinder system. I'm using an old HP XE310, which is a 1.2GHz P3/512M/40G, with Ubuntu Feisty and a single Hauppauge ImpactVCB card. I have a Samsung colour CCD camera plugged into the card. After some difficulties (the server version of Feisty has problems identifying my hardware, the desktop version doesn't), its... nearly working. ZoneMinder is up, I can set up monitors, I'm just getting a blank raster rather than an image. I know the camera and the cable are OK as they work plugged into a TV, so that isn't it. I'm setting the monitors up as PAL, 352 x 288, greyscale, so that shouldn't be a problem. I can't get xawtv to run as it seems to have issues with the Intel 815E onboard video and scatters pixels all over the screen.

What is probably a side issue is that the card is a full-height PCI with four BNC inputs and absolutely no information on which ZM channels these correspond to. So I don't know which channel to look on. I have tried channels 0..3 but with no luck. Does anyone with one of these cards know how the sockets are assigned?

Thanks for any assistance,

Michael

achix · Post by **achix** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 10:20 am

whats your device?
for v4l it should be /dev/videoX.
If your card has only one chip you should see only /dev/video0
For ZM first timers xawtv is a must. You gotta see video from there before anything else.
Unfortunately i haven't install ZM on some linux to have first time experience, although one of my colleagues at work has problem also
with his onboard video card on ubuntu.

Lee Sharp · Post by **Lee Sharp** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 8:39 pm

I thought I would try and find your card first. This page is a start. http://www.hauppauge.com/html/impact.htm Is your card the one here? http://www.hauppauge.com/html/images/impactvcb_649.jpg

If so, you will be /dev/video0 and 4 channels. However, this page says something different. http://wiki.videolan.org/Hardware_Compatibility_list So, what you got?

mhamel · Post by **mhamel** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 12:41 am

It is indeed the #64900 version, also known as the model 188. I'm beginning to suspect that the problem may be a camera issue; the camera has 8 DIP switches on the back that do various things to the signal. I'm wondering if the fact that a TV can display what its producing doesn't necessarily mean that the ImpactVCB can cope with it. I'll try experimenting with the switches tonight and see what happens...

Thanks,

Michael

mhamel · Post by **mhamel** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 7:56 am

Well, that isn't it. What I have learned is that the BNC connectors correspond to /dev/video0 channel 0..3, 0 at the bottom and 3 at the top. I know this because I get a blue raster when the camera isn't connected to the channel I am watching, and a black raster when it is. Unfortunately thats all I get; just a black screen. The camera is definitely OK when connected to a TV, so I'm wondering if I have a Bad Card. I guess I had better try it in a Windows box and see if that works.

Michael

achix · Post by **achix** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 9:01 am

Did you try PAL/NTSC ?

mhamel · Post by **mhamel** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 7:38 pm

Yes. Its a PAL camera. The good news is that the camera and card work just fine under Windows. So the problem has got to be a software issue of some kind. I'm trawling through the v4l lists now looking for anything useful. The strange thing is that bttv seems to know all about my card, but it just doesn't quite know how to work it. The relevant dmesg entries are:

[ 35.914232] bttv: driver version 0.9.16 loaded
[ 35.914242] bttv: using 8 buffers with 2080k (520 pages) each for capture
[ 35.914375] bttv: Bt8xx card found (0).
[ 35.914411] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 35.914431] bttv0: Bt878 (rev 17) at 0000:01:00.0, irq: 16, latency: 132, mmio: 0xf4000000
[ 35.914452] bttv0: detected: Hauppauge WinTV [card=10], PCI subsystem ID is 0070:13eb
[ 35.914458] bttv0: using: Hauppauge (bt878) [card=10,autodetected]
[ 35.914513] bttv0: gpio: en=00000000, out=00000000 in=00ffffff [init]
[ 35.917003] bttv0: Hauppauge/Voodoo msp34xx: reset line init [5]
[ 35.951529] tveeprom 2-0050: Hauppauge model 64900, rev B1 , serial# 8619710
[ 35.951535] tveeprom 2-0050: tuner model is Unspecified (idx 2, type 4)
[ 35.951541] tveeprom 2-0050: TV standards UNKNOWN (eeprom 0x01)
[ 35.951546] tveeprom 2-0050: audio processor is None (idx 0)
[ 35.951551] tveeprom 2-0050: decoder processor is BT878 (idx 14)
[ 35.951556] tveeprom 2-0050: has no radio, has no IR receiver, has no IR transmitter
[ 35.951560] bttv0: Hauppauge eeprom indicates model#64900
[ 35.951564] bttv0: Switching board type from Hauppauge (bt878) to Hauppauge ImpactVCB (bt878)
[ 35.951570] bttv0: using tuner=4
[ 35.951681] bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA9887 @ 0x86... not found
[ 36.007721] bttv0: registered device video0
[ 36.007835] bttv0: registered device vbi0
[ 36.034015] bt878: AUDIO driver version 0.0.0 loaded
[ 36.034101] bt878: Bt878 AUDIO function found (0).
[ 36.034133] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:00.1[A] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 36.034144] bt878_probe: card id=[0x13eb0070], Unknown card.
[ 36.034146] Exiting..
[ 36.034152] ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:01:00.1 disabled
[ 36.034161] bt878: probe of 0000:01:00.1 failed with error -22

I'm not sure what to make of the failures at the end given the confident tone of "registered device video0"...

Michael

achix · Post by **achix** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 5:22 am

Did you define PAL on the camera settings in ZM? AUTO?

mhamel · Post by **mhamel** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 7:04 am

Well, I have made some more progress. The key discovery was that the channel settings for brightness/contrast/hue/colour had defaulted to 0 which does indeed give you a black screen. I had set them all to 50 thinking they were a percentage, but it seems they are actually a uint16 and once I tried 32000 all round I got a sort of image.

Unfortunately it wasn't a very good image, no colour and no vertical or horizontal sync, but the flickery bits of picture clearly had something to do with what the camera was pointed at. I experimented a bit more and managed to get xawtv going, which gave much the same results.

The weird thing is that I can get a stable picture, but still no colour, by selecting NTSC or AUTO in ZoneMinder, or PAL-NC in xawtv. Anything else means loss of sync. This doesn't make much sense as its definitely a PAL camera and I'm not in Argentina, but there it is. I have found other people complaining of similar problems with the bttv driver, but no solutions as yet. I'm going to look for later versions of bttv or tweaks to it that might give me colour.

Michael

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 7:32 pm

i assume you have told the driver you have an vcb by editing modprobe?

mhamel · Post by **mhamel** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 8:14 pm

No, it recognised the card itself - the dmesg I posted is from a fresh install.

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 8:17 pm

i have one of these and im sure i use the osprey setting.... 82 i think? Might be worth a go if you have exhausted all others

mhamel · Post by **mhamel** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 9:50 pm

Aha. Got it. I have colour.

The solution was to add a "options bttv pll=1" into /etc/modprobe.d/options. The bttv driver needed to be told that my card has a 28.6MHz crystal and that it should use the PLL to synthesise the 35.4MHz that it needs to do PAL colour. I am guessing that this parameter defaults to 0, which assumes that you are using a card with the right crystal for your local system. And I have been sold a card with an NTSC crystal despite the fact that we use PAL here....

So its working and I must say looks rather cool.

Michael

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 10:43 pm

so i was nowhere near lol

glad your running