ZoneMinder Forums

I have a server with PCI-X and 3.3 v signaling. I tried a spectra-8 and a Picolo Tetra card and neither worked. The ituner folks agreed that the spectra-8 had a problem with 3.3 v signaling and took it back. The Picolo Tetra almost worked - it was detected but we only got a black screen. I am thinking that was a 32 bit vs 64 bit driver problem.

Any other suggestions for PCI-X cards?

Another possibility was to bypass the PCI-X slot. I was wondering if I could hook up several USB converters like the Hauppauge's WinTV-USB and plug the cameras into them. Hauppauge may not be the best solution since the V4L drivers seem to be in a rudamentary state (although the sound problems with this driver would not be a problem for me). Has anyone done something like this. ZM can deal with USB cameras, would it be able to deal with USB capture?

Vassili Leonov <vleo@linuxmedialabs.com> writes:

> MDVA-3000 supports 3.3V /PCI 64MHz slots

This card has 8 Bt878 chips.
http://www.linuxmedialabs.com/product_d ... prodid=330[/url]

Hi,

ZM can deal with USB cameras, though they are rarely the best performing beasts. Basically if Linux can deal with a camera and you can view it through xawtv you can use it for ZM. One thing to be aware of though is that USB cams aren't too intelligent about sharing bandwidth on the bus if there is more than one on there. You normally have to pass specific options to the drivers to indicate that they should use on half or a quarter of the bandwidth if they share it with other devices. This obviously slows the capture rate down somewhat.

Phil,

Yes, I agree about the inferiority of USB cameras.

First they use inferior imagers - even the higher end Logitech Orbit camera I'm using with it's CCD (not CMOS) sensor doesn't have great picture quality.

Second, the cpu utilization is horrible. On my 1Ghz P3 512mb, I have this USB camera, and a standard one hooked in through an bt878 card. Both capturing at 320x240, top shows zmc taking up 20-30% cpu, while the bt878 zmc process takes less than 1% cpu.

I'm not sure whether this is because ZM doesn't natively support YUV and has to convert to RGB, whether USB takes up a bunch of cpu cycles or if the webcam driver does a lot of processing.