ZoneMinder Forums

Anyone using the pv-149 card? i found a couple of people that have it, but no one has really posted much information regarding the card. I came across someone online that said that he tested it using ZM, however, he only got 15fps. This is a 120 total fps/ntsc card... it should get no less than 30. I was wondering if anyone had any real data? also, someone said, on this forum, that if you use more than one card, they have to have a model number ending in a, b, c and d. In other words, card 1 ends in a, card 2 ends in b and so on. Can anyone verify this information?

I'm running a PV-149 card with my ZM server.
This card is 100fps/PAL 120fps/NTSC. I use PAL cameras and run them at 10fps which is just fine for my requirements. On reading your thread I tested the card to see max. fps it would do. The four cameras at 353x288 ran no less than 20fps and peaked at 26.67fps ,but mainly sat around 20fps. I have run the cameras up to 640x480 but normally use the 352x288.
As I only run one PV-149 card on the system I can't comment on having to have an a or b to run 2 PV-149 cards. I do run a Pico single chip 4 port card & a single port WinFast 2000 card along side the PV-149 without any trouble. I bought the PV-149 from www.bluecherry.net perhaps you could email them with that question?

Sika

Sika wrote:I'm running a PV-149 card with my ZM server.
This card is 100fps/PAL 120fps/NTSC. I use PAL cameras and run them at 10fps which is just fine for my requirements. On reading your thread I tested the card to see max. fps it would do. The four cameras at 353x288 ran no less than 20fps and peaked at 26.67fps ,but mainly sat around 20fps. I have run the cameras up to 640x480 but normally use the 352x288.
As I only run one PV-149 card on the system I can't comment on having to have an a or b to run 2 PV-149 cards. I do run a Pico single chip 4 port card & a single port WinFast 2000 card along side the PV-149 without any trouble. I bought the PV-149 from www.bluecherry.net perhaps you could email them with that question?

Sika

I sent them an email last night asking what the capture rate was, and they are telling me 30fps. why would it not capture at its full frame rate?

i got an email this morning from the support guy at blue cherry, his email said:

At 320x240 you will get 30FPS (realtime).....if you increase the resolution you will get between 20-30FPS.....this is a limitation of the
BT878 chipset (and most MPEG4) chipsets as they are meant for lower resolution.

> Curtis, is this card theoretically capable of capturing at 30fps, or
> actually capable. I have read 2 reports, now, by actual people using
> this card; they say they are only getting 20fps at 353x288. They also
> advised they got their capture card from your company.

This card captures at 120FPS over 4 ports, so 30FPS per port. The
manufacturer suggests an Intel motherboard (chipset) however we've
used AMD without any problems
Thanks

>> can you confirm that the pv-149 can actually capture video at
>> 30fps/chan? i have found conflicting evidence, online, that suggests
>> otherwise. also, are there any specific motherboard chipsets that
>> this card must be used with?

can anyone confirm this?

also the fps in zm is not 100% accurate and Phil has this in the docs. It there or there abouts, but sometimes mine reports 40 fps from a single chip!
I would think your card could do 30 fps at 640x480 per channel but thats a hell of aload for your server and i would suggest that the server would drop the framrate down to 20 not the card.Also if you run it through xawtx or tvtime this will have a far less load on the server and you will get realtime from this (im sure that if the 878 chips couldnt do realtime for tv watching most forums would say stay away drom bttv its slow!

We bought 4 Pv-149

At the moment we have a full loaded server with them.
That's a total of 16 cameras. (half with motion detection at the moment (320x240))

No problem at the moment.
Just reduce the fps to something more realistic for the server to handle.
(ours is doing 5fps (at detection) at every cam, because at more fps we got some OOM errors on linux kernel).

Machine hardware: 1 Opteron 244 with 1Gb

Just get the four diferents versions (a,b,c,d) and you are fine.
(we bought them from Blue Cherry )

Pol

I bought the Pv-149 and installed in the server. However, i have a problem where the computer keeps restarting. It gets all the up to the point that the ZM Console loads in FireFox and then it reboots. I have tried the card in other PCI slots and made sure it was seated properly. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Is there anything in /var/log/messages that indicates any kind of error? I would possibly suspect a RAM issue, can you do a memory test?

How did you get this card to work at 640x480?

I can only get it to work at 320x240.

Thanx,

mycal

what do your logs say when you go above 320x240 mycal

Your right it was a memory issue, I followd up my other post with the
fix.

I edited rc.local with the following:

# setup shared memeory
echo 134217728 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
echo 134217728 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmall

also applied to the command line and all is well,

thanx,

mycal

aSoso wrote:We bought 4 Pv-149

At the moment we have a full loaded server with them.
That's a total of 16 cameras. (half with motion detection at the moment (320x240))

No problem at the moment.
Just reduce the fps to something more realistic for the server to handle.
(ours is doing 5fps (at detection) at every cam, because at more fps we got some OOM errors on linux kernel).

Machine hardware: 1 Opteron 244 with 1Gb

Just get the four diferents versions (a,b,c,d) and you are fine.
(we bought them from Blue Cherry )

Pol

do you know if a athlon X2 4600 with 2gig of ram can support 32camera

a 4600 at 320x240 will peak at around 150-180 fps with mmx
so if you run at 1 or 2 fps then you will be ok anything over 100fps needs care