Capture Card seems to work but can't get images

salix · Post by **salix** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 10:46 pm

Hello!

I just made a fresh Gentoo install for a new zoneminder setup an stumbled across some problems. I bought a cheap capture card providing 4 channels and one chip. The chipset used is bt878.

The card is recognized and I got a /dev/video0 which I can access using Zoneminder. But something seems to be wrong. Whenever I change the resolution higher than 320*240 the device goes red and that's it. But that is only the second problem I got.

The most disturbing thing is that I cannot get a good picture from the device. I tried different video norms and color modes and the best I got were blank or very distorted pictures.
To see if I did something wrong I just downloaded the live CD and tried this one. The results are not much better I managed to get a geometrically correct picture with distorted colours.
To see if the card is damaged I put it into a Windows PC and installed the software. The picture is o.k. there using the same input and the same camera.

What can I do?

Post by **zoneminder** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 4:17 pm

Have you tried using the card with xawtv or are you going straight in with ZM?

As it has only one chip, it will confuse the card if you have more than one monitor set up and try changing the size etc for only one monitor at a time as they all have to be the same.

salix · Post by **salix** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 7:09 pm

The gentoo system is console only and because of this if have tried zoneminder directly (watching from a second machine). Using the LiveCD I tried Xawtv and TVtime as well but was not really sure how to use them properly. So I tried zoneminder through firefox on localhost and got the best pic so far as described below.

On both setups I have just configured one monitor, but was not able to go higher than 320*240 - on the gentoo installation the monitor becomes red and on the LiveCD I get a broken Image when I try to watch it.

At the moment I am quite confused because when I setup a system using a bt848 tv capture card with just one composite Input it worked right out of the box.

The card giving me troubles looks like this one - although I bought it from a different shop. The shop promised Linux compatibility.
klick