Jason,
You were getting most success with card type 77 but it wasn't working over 4fps. Well card type 77 is for a four input card and by doing what you are doing you are saying that each 878A device is using it's four inputs. I believe that this board is just 8 inputs and dedicates each input to the one chip so you define 8 instances of a 1 input board.
The cards are defined in bttv-cards.c and what you are looking for there is one with 1 input so that entry will have the line:
Note that there should be a tab between the s and the = sign but spaces are there for those entries that have only one input (Grrrr!). There is also an entry for
muxsel for each card which will have as many values as inputs. This is the value that is fed to 878A to define which of the 4 possible inputs is used (MUX0=2, MUX1=3, MUX2=1 and MUX3=0 just to be confusing). Therefore if the one input is fed to the first input then you are looking for a value of 2 as the only entry in muxsel. Card type 102 seems to fit the bill (assuming there is a 28 MHz crystal on board). If that doesn't work then try card type 85.
Because you are going to be creating a lot of frames if you enable all these cards together I suggest you do a couple of things. One is try it with just one card entry (card=102) and then start adding some more as you are confident of the ability of your machine to cope. The other thing is that the bttv driver could do with a few extra buffers in my opinion if you are not going to drop frames so set the value of gbuffers to be higher than the default 8, say 16 if you can. So hopefully your final configuration will be started by the line:
Code: Select all
modprobe bttv gbuffers=16 card=102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102
and you should then get 25fps for each card. Why were you only getting 4fps maximum before? Well because you were specifying a card with 4 inputs, the bttv driver was sharing the frame rate of 25fps (for PAL) with 4 inputs giving a theoratical maximum of 6.25fps but because four inputs are rarely synchronised you typically see a maximum of 4 fps for each input (it was probably waiting at each of the dead inputs).
Looks like you have a Kodicom KMC-8800 or what is a clone of it all right from the web site reference you supplied. Please take a good straight on picture of the card without glare (natural daylight might be best) and stick it somewhere on the web. The reason for this is so that the card details can be added to the V4L wiki and if we gather enough information on it, it can get it's own card type like it's sister KMC-4400R card.
The 4400R uses a mux which needs to be set up to the appropriate input which is why LEDs were lit when driving your card with that card type. If you can please get the 878A data sheet from Conexant and see which pins the LEDs and other chips are connected to on this board.
Please indicate the chip number of the chips to the left and right of the big chip in the centre out of interest. I don't believe this card has a mux like the 4400R but just in case there could be some indication of other tasks that would lead this board to be composed of two card types like the 4400R.
I don't know what Phil thinks but I wouldn't go for motion detect on 8 inputs that were coming in at 25fps because of the amount of time that processing would take.
I hope this info resolves your problems.
Regards,
Conor Downey
and instead it is fine to put in all the card definitions at once.
