Any experience: eBay 8ch 8x878A card

[peterloron]

Bigmaxy, narmar: Are the cards still working for you? Are you running all 8 channels?

Thanks!

[Bigmaxy]

Hi, Card is still working perfectly fine, I added a 12cm fan blowing over card that I had laying around as I didn't have any heatsinks at hand. I'm not doing this because it is required but because the chips do run rather warm and I felt it was good practice to keep them happy.
I am runnign 6 of the 8 channels because that is how many cameras I have. I have configured the other 2 channels and disabled them, I have tested them and they do work.
Hope this helps.
Cheers

[peterloron]

Awesome, thanks!

Out of curiosity, what sort of resolution and framerate do you get from your six cameras?

-Pete

[Bigmaxy]

I can get 640x480 at 40fps from each, sometimes the framerate drops lower than this and I have ended up configuring it down on most cameras as the CPU usage was quite high.
Even when it says 40fps though, it really doesn't look like it, This is the same with the last type of cards I used though so not related to this unit.

[narmar]

Yes, it works. i've got now only 4 cameras. i set 5fps on half PAL. I've very poor conection so i can't check better resolutions and fps now.

[peterloron]

Well, I ordered my card today. We'll see how things work out!

[nlinux]

Hey Guys,

I bought one of these cards to replace a couple of single chip 878 boards. I've installed this and I'm getting everything detected using:

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options bttv card=77,77,77,77,77,77,77,77

dmesg shows me all of the bttv devices fine:

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[   31.185047] bttv: driver version 0.9.17 loaded
[   31.185050] bttv: using 8 buffers with 2080k (520 pages) each for capture
[   31.185095] bttv: Bt8xx card found (0).
[   31.185129] bttv0: Bt878 (rev 17) at 0000:08:08.0, irq: 21, latency: 32, mmio: 0xe200f000
[   31.185769] bttv0: using: GrandTec Multi Capture Card (Bt878) [card=77,insmod option]
[   31.185793] bttv0: gpio: en=00000000, out=00000000 in=00ffffff [init]
[   37.583106] bttv0: tuner absent
[   37.583216] bttv0: registered device video0
[   37.583301] bttv0: registered device vbi0
[   37.583326] bttv0: PLL: 28636363 => 35468950 .. ok
.
.
.
.
[   76.198152] bttv: Bt8xx card found (7).
[   76.198181] bttv7: Bt878 (rev 17) at 0000:08:0f.0, irq: 20, latency: 32, mmio: 0xe2001000
[   76.198191] bttv7: using: GrandTec Multi Capture Card (Bt878) [card=77,insmod option]
[   76.198214] bttv7: gpio: en=00000000, out=00000000 in=00fffff0 [init]
[   82.597611] bttv7: tuner absent
[   82.597631] bttv7: registered device video7
[   82.597648] bttv7: registered device vbi7
[   82.597672] bttv7: PLL: 28636363 => 35468950 .. ok
[  140.472505] bttv0: PLL can sleep, using XTAL (28636363).

The problem is I can't see any of my camera's in ZM, I can see them all fine in xawtv though which makes it even more confusing. I have a ZM monitor set to use /dev/video0 on channel 0 at 640x480, and all I see is a black box. That's what I see for /dev/video0 - /dev/video7 on channel 0, but if I do this with Xawtv, I see a very nice picture from each camera:

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 xawtv -device /dev/video0
This is xawtv-3.95.dfsg.1, running on Linux/i686 (2.6.24-19-generic)
xinerama 0: 1920x1200+0+0
xinerama 1: 1280x1024+1920+0
WARNING: remote display `localhost:10.0' not allowed, using `:10.0' instead
can't open x11 display :10.0
v4l-conf had some trouble, trying to continue anyway
v4l2: WARNING: framebuffer size mismatch
v4l2: me=3200x1200 v4l=0x0
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-ledfixed-medium-r-*--39-*-*-*-c-*-*-*" to type FontStruct
ioctl: VIDIOC_REQBUFS(count=2;type=VIDEO_CAPTURE;memory=MMAP): Success

I'm suspecting that v4l has an issue with this card since I see xawtv using v4l2, anyone got any insight for me?

[peterloron]

Are those of you with this card using them in Intel or AMD machines?

[nlinux]

I found my problem, and it was all permissions related, this post will help others that arrive here

http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... mfix+chmod

Peterloron,

I'm using this card in an Intel Core2 6600 box, and it seems to work great so far.

[narmar]

peterloron: I'm using AMD 64.

[Bigmaxy]

Intel P4 Northwood here