ZoneMinder Forums

I'm looking to purchase a PCIe video capture card for use with four CCTV cameras connected via BNC plugs. Anyone have any suggestions as to compatible card?

I plan to use Ubuntu and Zone Minder for a 24/7 Record. Would like 25fps or greater good image quality and good compression of the video (H.264?). The card must be PCIe as I have no PCI slots on my motherboard.

Thanks for your help.

OK. I’ve found three cards so far. All around or over £100 for Linux compared to Win 7 compatible card around £30ish on ebay and none of them record in Full D1.

Bluecherry BC-H04120A = $219.95 about £138
Bluecherry BC-H08240A = $259.95 about £163
Camsecure 5008 = £99.99

Anyone use a PCIe DVR Card?

Anyone know of a store that delivers to the UK which sells them?

Anyone know of a list of compatible PCIe DVR Cards?

http://store.bluecherry.net/capture-car ... supported/

Email support for ZM compatibility (it used to be part of the description). At least a couple pcie cards listed here.

Thanks for your help. I have managed to find a 4 Channel LinkDelight DVR Capture Card from ebay. Cost arround £13 so very cheap but it supports

4 x Cameras
H.264 encription
Full D1 Playback and Record (704×576)
NTSC:120FPS, PAL: 100FPS

Hey 337Manni how is the card?

Going to order it tomorrow is there something bad about it?

thanks

I have just installed the LinkDelight 8 channel PCI card (not PCI-E) on Lubuntu 12.10. I installed the tw68-v2 driver from git://gitorious.org/tw68/tw68-v2.git. It was a bare metal Lubuntu install. I just had to install git, make and gcc to run the git install. The card works fine although the colours seem a bit off (yes I have spent a while tweaking the colour settings) compared to the Compro PVR 2000 card it replaced.

zSeries wrote:I have just installed the LinkDelight 8 channel PCI card (not PCI-E) on Lubuntu 12.10. I installed the tw68-v2 driver from git://gitorious.org/tw68/tw68-v2.git. It was a bare metal Lubuntu install. I just had to install git, make and gcc to run the git install. The card works fine although the colours seem a bit off (yes I have spent a while tweaking the colour settings) compared to the Compro PVR 2000 card it replaced.

What is the frame rate like?

I only have two analog PAL CCTV cameras to test it with. Connected to one of the TW6816 chips I am getting 25fps on both cameras. It is not a powerful PC. A cheap Gigabyte M68M mobo, 1GB RAM and a dual core Athon II 270u processor (thats a rare a low power CPU using only 25W). Load is 0.52. I have not turned on any zones yet but will get to that over the weekend. I plan to buy two more cameras in the next week or so.

zSeries..can you post a url where you bought the LinkDelight cards. I've looked around and cannot locate those cards.

I read where you might be moving to motion from zm because of your interlaced issue. Did you stay that course?

thanks for any info.

Just go to the linkdelight website. This should work...

http://www.linkdelight.com/ESC10-8CH-DV ... -Card.html

I never did solve the interlace corruption problem in zoneminder. It must either be a bug or a performance problem caused by the way zm is coded. The card works perfectly using "Motion". Just google it. The whole "Motion" config is a few text files, you dont have the nice user interface of zm (no user defined zones and no playback of events) but it works perfectly and the framerate is good. For playback you can simply navigate the folders where it stores the jpegs, movies or timelapse stuff. I use Nomachine to logon directly to the server from the internet so I am running a regular full remote Linux session.

The card comes with software for Windows called iDVR 4000. Some of it works and some doesnt. Support from LinkDelight is appauling. I have now tried 3 different versions of the iDVR software and they all have different bugs so I am giving up on running the card on Windows too. So it is Lubuntu 12.10 and Motion for me.

Thanks for the reply..and the reference to nomachine. I'll have to explore that further. You must be a mainframe guy so thanks and br14.

IEB COPY.

I love it.

any interlace issue isnt zm related but driver related. Did you try adjusting the v4l2 options?
Ive noticed on more mature hardware the deinterlace filters work but new stuff does not. Again this is a driver issue and will settle. I have tried using a new connexant based pci-c card with success apart from the odd rolling image and interlace issues. bt878 based cards do not have this issue.

Id be interested to see why motion manages it and appartly zm cannot as they both rely on the linux drivers of the card.

James,

I appreciate your update. Motion is not the only software that works fine, Cheese GUVCViewer are OK too. My issue with ZM is described in http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20784 where the problem and set up is described in detail. The image shown is static so should not suffer any interlacing issues. I spent hours trying all kinds of V4L options in ZM, turned on all kinds of debugging (something I am used to on on non-Linux systems for years). The only thing I found that makes any difference in ZM is reducing the frame rate, the lower the rate the more stable the image. If the only way to fix this is to update the driver then it is not something I can do as I am not an experienced C programmer on PCs and really don't have the time free to learn it in enough depth to fix this.