ZoneMinder Forums

I purchased this generic 4 chip DVR card on Ebay. It turned out to be a card from Kodicom, called the 4400R. It has 4 878A chips, but is not yet support by the BTTV drivers in Video4Linux. However, here are the steps to get the card working.

1) Download the latest v4l snapshot from bytesex.org - at the moment, this is
http://dl.bytesex.org/cvs-snapshots/vid ... 051.tar.gz
2) Re-configure your linux kernel *without* any video4linux drivers. To do
this, go to your linux kernel source directory (e.g.
/usr/src/linux-2.6.11-gentoo-r7 or whatever you are using) and
"make menuconfig". Under "Device Drivers", select "Multimedia devices",
then set "Video For Linux" to "<M>" (compile as modules). Next, under
the sub-heading "Video For Linux --->" make sure *no* video adapters
are selected (this means, in particular, the 'bttv' adapter must *not*
be selected.
3) Regenerate your kernel (just the same as when you do a kernel update -
make, make modules_install), install it and re-boot your system.
4) Now, running under 'root', unpack the video4linux source from (1) into
/usr/src, i.e.
cd /usr/src
tar xzf {wherever you put it}/video4linux-2005-05-18-013051.tar.gz
5) Compile the v4l drivers, i.e.
cd /usr/src/video4linux
make
make install
6) At this point you should be "ready to go" - all you need to do is to
install the (new) bttv driver:
modprobe bttv card=0x85,0x84,0x85,0x85
This should give you 4 video devices (/dev/video0 - /dev/video3), and
you should be able to use them with any program, e.g. xawtv or whatever.

Just for your interest, the "card=...." is because the Kodicom is actually 4 different bt878a controllers; the *second* one detected is actually the "master" and the other three are "slaves", so my coding needs to treat them differently.

Many thanks to William M Brack, the developer who wrote this driver patch.

-=STZ=-

Thanks for the heads up on this. Hopefully you'll save a lot of people a lot of time!

Phil

I have error in de step 4

to it executes make I have the following message


for_device' from incompatible pointer type
make[2]: *** [/usr/src/video4linux/bttv-driver.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/usr/src/video4linux] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.7-2.tmb.6mdk'
make: *** [default] Error 2

Note that the location where the CVS V4L code is no longer maintained. Kraxel (Gerd Knorr) is no longer the official maintainer of bttv code and he has passed the code onto this site:
http://cvs.linuxtv.org/cvs.php
where there are instructions on how to download the latest code. It's possible that the version of kernel you are trying to compile with is too old to work with the version of code you've downloaded or that this bug has been seen and fixed. Version 2.6.13 of the kernel has the code for this card already available in it but higher versions of the kernel cannot work with devfs and need to work with udev.

I've updated the V4L Wiki information for this card with some of what I have found with it. See:
http://linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Kodicom_4400R

I'm currently working with this card myself and will see if there is a way of updating the driver to use the ioctl function to operate some of the features of this card such as the video output and the LEDs on each Bt878A device.

There are also a few other posts on this card in this forum if a search is made on Kodicom or 4400R.

Regards,

Conor Downey

im impressed. If you can get the output and video out working i will be well impressed.

Good luck

James

jameswilson wrote:im impressed. If you can get the output and video out working i will be well impressed.

Good luck

James

I know this is an ancient thread but wondering if anyone got the video output to work on the 4400r?