Re: Multiple Port Grabber Cards

From: Don Wilson (Wilson_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 08/14/04 

Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 18:01:02 -0700

Hi, I was pleased to find this thread. I know the good cards have a chip for
each input, but I have been asked to use a Provideo SV140 four-input card
with only one BT878 capture chip. I would like to use a better card for this
project but the lowest price I can find is around $360 for the four chip
model, versus $120 for the single chip.

I have the driver loaded and it only appears as a single video capture
source "BT878 Capture 2" I can use my software, based on the AMCap sample and
it only sees the first input. So far I have not been able to get the
"Security Eyes" software that comes with the card to work. It only shows a
grid of blue screens. I have filled out a technical support form but no
response yet. Interesting though, the "Security Eyes" software does start the
card switching inputs. After I exit "Security Eyes" and return to my app the
preview window is switching rapidly between the inputs.

I would appreciate anly clues as to how to control the switching in my app.
We do not need much speed, one or two frames per second is fine. The
application will just be saving stills when certain events happen.

Thanks,

Don

"Chris P. [MVP]" wrote:

> Thore Karlsen [MVP DX] wrote:
>
> >
> >> Ditto. All the good ones we've seen enumerate as individual capture
> >> devices. There are some cheaper cards that may only have a single
> >> capture chip behind a video mulitplexor - these cards cannot get
> >> full frame rate from all channels.
> >
> > There are other problems with it as well, such as auto gain on the
> > chip getting confused with multiple sources, and if one camera goes
> > down it could take all the others on the chip with it, too. There's
> > also the problem with bouncing video where it doesn't capture the
> > same field of the frame every time. Can't change procamp properties
> > per input, either. In general, multiplexed inputs are a terrible
> > solution.
>
> Yes, and with the multi-chip boards being so cheap and common now there's no
> reason to use the old crap. Just find a vendor that will give you support,
> we've tried some Taiwanese brands that have badly written drivers and no
> support. Obviously this problem isn't limited to Taiwan.
>
> >> Also beware of PCI bus limitations if you start trying to stack up
> >> mulitple cards in a machine.
> >
> > Absolutely. Server class machines generally work better for this. Do
> > you have any experience with PCI Express?
>
> Yes. PCI Express (PCI-X) works great here because most machines that have
> it usually only have 1 or 2 physical slots per bus. You can easily run 3 or
> 4, 4-channel cards in a machine with your only limitation being what you
> actually do with the image data. The OEM servers has been pretty good for
> this. But watch out, we found one capture card that caused the Dell 1750 to
> blow up. We tried it again after the motherboard replacement to make sure
> and blew it up again. Dell asked us to stop doing that. It worked in other
> Dell hardware so we think it's a power issue.
>
>
>

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