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multiple camera same brand

Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2004 6:40 am
by tu_ma
I'm trying to install 2 cameras. They're both creative webcam pro. If I plug it in one at a time, it works just fine. But if I have both plug in at the same time, only one of them works, that is /dev/video0

/dev/video0 doesn't seems to work at all.
And the syslog says:
Sep 16 23:46:10 xbox zmc-d1[17837]: INF [Got TERM signal, exiting]
Sep 16 23:46:10 xbox zmc-d1[17837]: ERR [Sync failure for frame 0: Interrupted system call]
Sep 16 23:46:20 xbox zmc-d1[19943]: INF [Debug Level = 0, Debug Log = ]
Sep 16 23:46:20 xbox kernel: ov511.c: ERROR: urb->status=-75: Babble (bad cable?)


any help pls ..

*edit for typo

Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 8:54 pm
by zoneminder
I'm guessing these are USB cameras right? If so then one USB camera will assume it has full use of the USB bus.. If you put two on then they will both assume this and fight for the resource which normally means that it actually won't work for either of them.

The solution to this is to pass a parameter to the driver telling it to divide the bandwidth allocated to each. So as it looks like you are using the ov511 driver you should edit /etc/modules.conf and put in the following line

options ov511 cams=2

assuming you have something like

alias char-major-81-0 ov511

already in there, though this might not be required.

I _think_ the cams option can be powers of two (ie not 3) but the bigger the number you make it the less bandwidth and so frame rate, you will get from each camera.

Phil,

Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 10:10 pm
by tu_ma
Phil,

Thank you for the reply. I got it to work. Right now, both camera on same bus is doing 4.5 fps, but it works for MoDetect mode.

thx