hauppauge 4 input card

[yosco]

I have SUSE 90 and 2 Hauppauge cards in the server. I seem to be able to only fire up Inputs 0-2 on each card. Which is, when looking from the bottom of the card is the 2 RCA and 3rd RCA and the s-video port. I'm using the BTTV drivers. When I look at the config of the system zmu it does show all devices. Also note that the S-video ports are desplaying grey only on color cards.

Anyone know how to troubleshoot this?

[zoneminder]

Hi Scott,

Can you get all inputs working with xawtv or something else like that?

Phil,

[yosco]

I can't figure out how to specify the inputs in xawtv? I seems to always revert to 1. I did figure out the grey s-video problem. It was the s-video adaptor to rca, it makes the image grey.

[yosco]

KwinTV is the program I'm using not xawtv, sorry. xawtv doen't work on my system. (I get garbled screen, in any mode). The problem I still have is that I can't seem to change the imputs on KwinTV.

[zoneminder]

Do you know if your card has one video capture chip or several? In other words are you expected /dev/video0, video1 etc or just different channels on one video device?

I've never use KwinTV so I can't help you there I'm afraid.

Phil,

[gessel]

If it's an ImpactVCB card, I think it can only switch between 3 inputs - there must be some setting to go from the s-vid to the 1st RCA composite, but I don't know what it is.

The card has only one BT848 capture chip (at least the two I have do).

[yosco]

My card has one /dev/video0 and 4 channels, Interesting that maybe you can switch an input. Let me know if you find more, I'm currently working with six channels on 3 cards since I can't get the 3 RCA to fireup and the s-video port is grey

[gessel]

Try MoTV.

It has a more intuitive and useful interface to switching inputs and actually labels them. However, with the ImpactVCB cards, there's some major wackyness going on. The 878 has a four port internal switch, so in theory it can get 4 video inputs, but I'm starting to think that it turns out when you actually build a capture card with it, you find out that s-video requires 2 of those inputs, one for chorminance and one for luminance, and therefore you build your next card with 2 RCAs and one S-video... but that may not be true at all.

Even if that's not true, using MoTV I found the following names applied to the various ports. None applied to the third RCA. I swapped HDs on this box and ran Hauppage's Video32 or whatever it's called under NT4 and it gave exactly the same results.

:: O O O (ports :: is the s-video O is composite)
2 1 0 NC (inputs (ZM "channels")) channel 3 is the luminance signal of channel 2.
3 (2 in black and white only)

"Television" is the middle composite port
"Composite 1" is the input port closest to the S-Video port (1)
"S-Video" is the S-Video port (2)
"Composite 2" is the luminance channel of the S-Video port (3)

The third composite port seems to be unreadable.

Presumably if you used a cable which allowed you to feed a composite
input (luminance plus chrominance signal) into the luminance channel
of the S-Video port, "Composite 2" would show this signal in color.

Effectively this is a 3 input card.

I also have two of these inexpensive cards in my machine under RH9, having rebuilt the kernel to 2.4.24 and updated all of the bttv patches on Gerd's site (and having rebuilt X11 to support the mach64 DRI) and I get hard crash when I try to use the second card (/dev/video1). I've ruled out an obvious hardware failure because if I swap the cards, /dev/video0 is always in slot zero and always reads fine (whichever card it is) and both cards work identically under windows (one is rev A and one is rev B using different releases of the 878 and having been mfg'd a year apart.).

Once you get the inputs sorted out, let me know if you're having any luck reading 6 inputs...

[gessel]

scott,

I have an interesting problem with two of those impactVCB cards - I can't use the second one at all. If I try MoTV on /dev/video1 (no matter which card is installed to be /dev/video1 - so it's not a hardware problem) xwindows freaks out and crashes. I tried to solve the problem by upgrading to the latest BTTV and v4l2, but no luck. What's your driver config?

-David

[yosco]

What's the OS, The cards I have are actual Hauppauge cards, ImpactVCB may be using the exact same chipset I couldn't get any of the TV programs to work correctly with anything but /dev/video0 either. However however ZM worked fine with them. Maybe a recompile of the tv and video drivers would help.

-Scott

[gessel]

I switched from RH to the mandrake liveCD, still no inputs on the Hauppauge cards. I'm asking around (v4l mailing list, Hauppauge tech support), viz:

I have a freshly installed (zoneminder liveCD) and freshly updated Mandrake 9.2 install on a Compaq EN SFF PII-400.

I have two Hauppauge ImpactVCB 64405 878 based capture cards installed. Both cards work fine as /dev/video0 (tested by swapping slots) under either Mandrake or RH9 (I tried that first) and under NT4, (but the "detect multiple cards" option in the windows configure was flaky - it worked on initial install, but when I tried the Osprey 100 drivers, I couldn't get it to work again. Either card works perfectly in PCI slot 1, but problematically in PCI slot 2. I'd call that a semi-success in Windows, making the Linux problems all the more vexing.)

The card configuration (model #, revs, SN's, slots) is at
http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/v4l/cards.txt

Initially I tried to install under RH9 - but ran into other problems trying to solve a memory leak in the latest httpd RPMs, and ended up making a mess of things. So I switched to the liveCD install.

Under Mandrake (and similarly under RH9, though it also soon crashed xwindows) I cannot get XAWTV to show the video from /dev/video1. The window opens fine, but it stays black, then every 10 seconds or so, a few scan lines of video get written. They appear to be correct, though it has never written far enough to fill in the other half of the interlace - just ever other scan line, about 10-20 of them.

Rather than creating a logfile mailbomb, the output of 'xawtv -v 2 -hwscan' is at
http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/v4l ... _debug.txt

there's nothing I can see which would indicate why one card would work and the other not.

The output of 'xawtv -v 2 -c /dev/v4l/video0' is at
http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/v4l ... _debug.txt

This seems to work fine. There are some inaccuracies in the naming of the ports (detailed at the end of this message) but otherwise it works as expected.

The output of 'xawtv -v 2 -c /dev/v4l/video1' is at
http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/v4l ... _debug.txt

This doesn't work.

I CSDIFFed the files, and there's a pretty HTML coded version of the output, but I'm not sure what it means... but it looks nice.
http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/v4l ... -1diff.htm


I've also put together all the pertinent info I could find from other log files, plus the technical reference for the machine at
http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/v4l/

When working, the ports are mislabelled; a table of the ports is at:
http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/v4l ... ports.html

Any hints would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
-David

[gessel]

A bit more experimentation: I can get clean grabs with #xawtv -noxv -c /dev/video1, though the live display doesn't look good. Is the -noxv option applicable to the way zoneminder talks to the interface cards? Is there a way to implement it (or it's equivalent, if indeed, it is relevant)?

I updated my paen to the various gods of bttv drivers at http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/v4l/
including a screengrab of the weird results of #xawtv -c /dev/video1 vs. /dev/video0. If anybody has any good clues, I'd appreciate them. When looking at the wacky screen grab, note that if I swap cards, the problems don't swap (video0 is still in PCI 1, and still works on the card that was video1 in PCI 2, so there does not seem to be a hardware problem). Also that I can get a decent grab out of #xawtv -noxv -c /dev/video1 using the "j" keyboard command.

[lazyleopard]

I got myself an ImpactVCB - the one with 3 composite sockets and one scart socket. The composite socket nearest the main board doesn't work (which ties in with David Gessel's observations). By using a composite->S-Video plug I can get three video inputs, but they don't really behave in ZoneMinder unless they're all set up the same (all Grey, all 384x288, say). If there's a mix of geometries then strange things happen to pictures, and if there's a mix of Grey and RGB24 then the input that's RGB24 appears as three separate grey images squashed into the top third of the frame.

xawtv is able to show each channel just fine, but then it's only handling one at a time....

[matt_sf]

re: using xawtv for debugging/testing, I would get really bizarre live displays on my setup, too. I had to set the xawtv "capture" setting to "grabdisplay" ... its other modes being "off" and "overlay" I don't think the video chipset (built-in on my motherboard) is new enough to support overlay modes.

Anyway, I just had to make a small .xawtv file in my home directory to get it to startup correctly. All it has is:

[default]
norm = ntsc
capture = grabdisplay

obviously, your norm mode may vary :) This was for /dev/video0 on input 0 (on my card, the composite input) so since xawtv defaults to those, I have no specifications set in my config file for that. i hope this is useful information and not overly obvious :)

-Matt

[lazyleopard]

Oh, xawtv works just fine, but it's only dealing with one input at a time. It's zm that has trouble.