Can these cheap eBay things really be any good??!

bifferidge · Post by **bifferidge** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 6:40 pm

Hello,

I am planning on building my zoneminder box using 4 cameras and wonder if anyone has tried these 4xBNC BT878 cards I keep seeing on ebay that are really cheap....

Can these really do the job or do I need 4 separate cards?

I am not too worried about high fps or anything like that....

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 5737103914

davide · Post by **davide** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 7:14 pm

hi,
I use a cheap capture card very similar: grandtec.

having only 1 BT chip your FPS won't go over 6.25 (25PFS / 4 sources)
but if the card has a poor multiplexing chip you'll get even less

with my grandtec I get 3 FPS each camera

If you don't mind about FPS (like me) theese cards should work

bifferidge · Post by **bifferidge** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 8:19 pm

Hi - do you recall if your grandtec card configured automatically for each of the BNCs or if these needed to be set up individually?

thanks!
bifferidge

benbrown · Post by **benbrown** » Wed Jan 19, 2005 9:21 pm

I purchased one of these cards on eBay from someone in China. Card works fine. Needs:

options bttv card=77

in /etc/modules.conf

kevin_robson · Post by **kevin_robson** » Wed Jan 26, 2005 10:40 pm

Hi Ben,
I just bought one of these from a guy in China too. The picture is just about visible but the picture is awful. A bit like if you run a monitor above the resolution it is intended for - you can just about make out some of the screen? Hope that makes sense.

What settings did you have to set in ZM i.e. Resolution, PAL/NTSC?

I tried your setting in /etc/modules.conf but it stopped the card from being recognised at all.

Also, what distro did you use? I'm on Suse 9.2 but will switch to one that works if necessery.

Maybe I just got a duff card, or at least a different one to what you got. Definitly a 848 chip though.

Thanks,

JasonH · Post by **JasonH** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 8:51 am

I think there is more than one version of these cheapo cards. I bought one with a bt878 chip for about £3 plus £15 shipping from Hong Kong and it works quite well although it suffers badly from this problem. (I'm going to try Lazy Leopard's contribution out when I get chance). My card is This one.

It seems that Canadian company Novex are alledging that the hardware and software are pirated so you should probably bear this in mind when buying. I found out afterwards when googling to try and get the thing working

Although someone must have made a serious quantity of them to turn them out at that price!

I plan to use it for testing and perhaps purchase a better quality card when I'm happy with my setup.

kevin_robson · Post by **kevin_robson** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 7:14 pm

Thanks. Thats exactly the same card all right.
I don't suppose anyone else has got any better results from it have they?
Ben, is yours the same as that?

Knoppix-Zoneminder · Post by **Knoppix-Zoneminder** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 7:56 pm

I have a similar card, framerate is a little slow (2.63 fps each cam) but quality is reasonable considering the cost (about £16 i think it was) , shipped with Pico 2000 software for windows (it's total rubbish, the software that is).

Card has been very reliable for maybe 4 or 5 months, the only issue i have under Linux is that during the bootup process the system hangs for maybe 5 minutes while the bttv driver tries to identify the card, it eventually gives up and installs it as a unknown / generic card.

There is a windows driver also for this card (different than the one shipped with the card) , this driver has a utility called btspy, this generates a report on the card. Below is the report generated for my card.

General information:
Name:card
Chip: Bt878 , Rev: 0x00
Subsystem: 0x00000000
Vendor: Gammagraphx, Inc.
Values to MUTE audio:
Mute_GPOE : 0xf00000
Mute_GPDATA: 0xf00000
Has TV Tuner: No
Number of Composite Ins: 4
Composite in #1
Composite1_Mux : 2
Composite1_GPOE : 0xf00000
Composite1_GPDATA: 0xf00000
Composite in #2
Composite2_Mux : 3
Composite2_GPOE : 0xf00000
Composite2_GPDATA: 0xf00000
Composite in #3
Composite3_Mux : 1
Composite3_GPOE : 0xf00000
Composite3_GPDATA: 0xf00000
Composite in #4
Composite4_Mux : 0
Composite4_GPOE : 0xf00000
Composite4_GPDATA: 0xf00000
Has SVideo: No
Has Radio: No

-----

Hope this helps someone.

tux · Post by **tux** » Wed Mar 16, 2005 4:42 pm

Hello

If you search in ebay by cctv, there are cameras and cvr cards very cheap....

I wil building my zoneminder using this products :

- Capture card 4ch dvd 203 (60fps) $49.99
- 2 Dome cameras CCD 2x $44.95
-1 GESS 905C CCD 420 lines $79.99

http://stores.ebay.com/Global-Engineeri ... ty-Systems

What does your think products, are ok?

thanks.

tux · Post by **tux** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 7:20 pm

The card dvr don´t work in linux and cameras are only NTFS and I need PAL