ZoneMinder Forums

Hi and firstly thanks for a great and useful program!

I installed from the 1.19.1 LiveCD, and although the software itself is working like a dream, I am having a lot of problem operating the actual bttv driver. I have 4 almost identical bt878a cards with 4 composite/BNC inputs and one audio input each. I believe these may be the dreaded Pico2000 series of cards, but have no way of finding out for sure. Photos of a card can be seen here: front back

The driver either shows a very garbled image (card=0 generic), or seems to flicker between all inputs, no matter which input I select. The one driver which works passably well is card=13, where inputs 0 and 1 show a perfect full colour image, while 2 shows only b/w and 3 is not available. This is due to the driver thinking that 3 is a composite input with separate chrominance and luminance.

Can anybody help me sort out how to configure the bttv driver? And can anyone tell me how to load and unload the bttv module without having to modify /etc/modprobe.conf and restart? modprobe -r always fails because the module is in use!!

Cheers and thanks
Leon

Can someone at least tell me how to load and unload the bttv module without having to reboot? This shouldn't be that difficult...

Cheers & thanks,
Leon

I'm no expert in modules but I think rmmod will unload a module (provided you have unloaded all dependent modules, as displayed by lsmod, first). I think just doing a modprobe loads a module. I assume it still just takes it's option from modules.conf though I've never actually tested it.

Phil,

Also you might get some mileage out of insmod!

Phil,

Yes, that is the way I do it. make sure your modules.conf is set up right and use rmmod and modprobe. When you rmmode, you have to remove all of the modules for the card and perhaps some for the motherboard chipset. You can remove them all at once. I would skip insmod as you have to lod them one by one and give the full path for the driver I think. modprobe should load all the drivers needed if modules.conf is set up correctly. You can play with options in modules.conf and reload all you want without rebooting. Here is a list of modules, from lsmod,for my card and some extra related modules.

bttv 154272 0
tvaudio 22624 0
tvmixer 5744 0
msp3400 24192 0
tuner 18436 0
video_buf 21728 1 bttv
i2c_algo_bit 10184 1 bttv
v4l2_common 6368 1 bttv
btcx_risc 5060 1 bttv
i2c_core 26720 6 bttv,tvaudio,tvmixer,msp3400,tuner,i2c_algo_bit
videodev 10208 1 bttv