On 07/02/2015 11:14 PM, Nathaniel Bezanson wrote: > Hi all, > > If this isn't the appropriate venue for this question, please gently > steer me somewhere else. Thanks. :) I'm trying to head off the "well > you shouldn't have bought *that* junk in the first place!" advice by > doing some research ahead of time, and I'm here to check some > assumptions. > > I've been tasked with recommending a capture card for our > hackerspace's video monitoring system. We'll be using motion so > anything v4l/v4l2 is fair game. We presently have 8 cameras, but a > 16-channel card wouldn't go to waste. Only quirk is the host system > is PCI-Express only, no parallel PCI. > > I've found the much-lauded Bluecherry driver release in 2010: > http://ben-collins.blogspot.com/2010/06/softlogic-6010-4816-channel-mpeg-4.html > > It claims to be 90% functional, and I haven't found any updates since > then. Am I looking in the wrong place or is this completely orphaned? > Cards sometimes come up cheap and the board looks really > well-thought-out, but as a hardware guy I'm the last person you want > rooting around in driver source trying to solder some code together > and get the last bits working... The support for the solo devices is now part of the kernel and it is maintained there. I still get patches from Bluecherry and it is a mature card. > I found the intersil/techwell TW6869 chip on a very affordable card, > and there's a nice looking driver here: > https://github.com/igorizyumin/tw6869/ Only trouble is there only > seems to be the one card using it, and it's v1.0 hardware without > robust ESD protection on the inputs; I don't know if I'd expect it to > survive a decade connected to 200-foot camera leads. It's cheap > enough to keep spare boards around, though. Is this driver solid? Is > the chip? Are there other cards based on it? I don't know anything about this chip. Other Techwell devices give decent quality, but I've never used this one. > I popped into #v4l on freenode, and was pointed to the cx25821 chip, > which seems well supported but I can't find any actual names of cards > that claim to use it, except possibly a line of Russian cards and > maybe I can get a Russian-speaking friend to help figure out their > shopping cart... Is there a known/recommended Cx25821-based card I > should look for? (And is the 25853 similar?) There used to be a cx25821 card on dx.com (which is where I got mine), but it's out of stock. I haven't been able to find one either. It's unclear to me whether the 25853 is similar enough to work with the cx25821 driver. I'm not optimistic. > I've seen talk of the older Geovision cards using the Bt878a chips, > which is of course lovely, but I can't find any info on their PCIe > offerings, nor even high-res photos of the board. That's a shame cuz > their hardware looks really solid. Any chipset info? Anyone using > these? I don't think there is any linux support for Geovision PCIe cards. > Anything else I'm missing? No, I don't think so. If you want to have a well-supported card, then Bluecherry is your best bet. Techwell will likely work too, but the driver is not in the kernel (which may or may not be a problem for you). Getting it ready for inclusion into the kernel is a fair amount of work. Regards, Hans -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
