This is a driver for DC10plus capture cards from Pinnacle Systems Inc. and LML33 cards from Linux Media Labs (http://www.linuxmedialabs.com/). It also works with many old Miro DC10 cards with SAA7110A TV decoder and ADV7176 TV encoder (please, make sure that your card has these chips, otherwise the driver will not work). The driver is Video4Linux compliant and contains extensions to provide hardware support for full motion MJPEG compression and decompression. Since this driver is a derivative from the driver for Buz Iomega cards written by Dr. Rainer Johanni, http://www.johanni.de/munich-vision/buz/ they both have compatible API. I hope that this API will become a part of V4L standard. For more information and driver download, please, visit http://www.cicese.mx/~mirsev/Linux/DC10plus/ Supported Formats ================= Card: DC10/DC10plus LML33 TV standard: NTSC/PAL/SECAM(*) NTSC/PAL Format: Square pixel CCIR.601 640x480 NTSC 720x480 NTSC 768x576 PAL/SECAM(*) 720x576 PAL Frame rates: 30 frames/60 fields per second NTSC 25 frames/50 fields per second PAL/SECAM(*) (*) - SECAM is supported for input only in DC10/DC10plus cards. The output of the recorded SECAM video stream will be in PAL standard. Also, please, note that monitoring of the SECAM input signal at the DC10/DC10plus analog output may not be available. Please, use appropriate application like XawTV to watch full color SECAM video at the card input. Hardware compression ==================== Since the card provides hardware compression, even low end machines can be successfully used for movie capture and playback. I'm testing the driver with with 2.2.16 kernel running on 233 MHz Pentium MMX with 64M RAM on 430TX motherboard and with 10GB IDE drive from Western Digital Corp. On one test run with DC10plus card I've got 0 frames dropped during about 20 minutes of full motion NTSC (I live in Mexico) video capture with fully synchronized audio. Typical run of similar test can provide as few as 6-8 dropped frames per half of an hour. You mileage may vary, though. Tested applications =================== XawTV to watch video on your computer monitor. kwintv the same (you might need to use option lock_norm=1). lavtools To record and playback AVI or Quicktime files. Note: you will need patched version, lavtools-1.2p2 to support new features of this driver. Please visit driver homepage for more info. Broadcast2000 reportedly (I didn't try that) can accept movies recorded by lavrec in Quicktime format for editing and then edited movie can be played back by lavplay program. MainActor 3.5x also can accept movies recorded by lavrec for editing. The driver can to be used by two programs at the same time (please, see warning note below regarding this feature). Using XawTV you can watch what you are recording or playing back with lavtools. I've tested the following sequence and it worked for me: * start xawtv and switch inputs, TV standards, and adjust video (contrast, saturation, etc.). You may also run your favorite audio mixer application to adjust audio inputs. * run lavrec with options: -i<set your input and norm here> (to choose proper input and TV standard) -l -1 (to use audio mixer settings) Other lavrec option can be added at your choice. * watch the movie in xawtv window while recording it as AVI or Quicktime file. * when recording is finished, run lavplay or xlav and watch your clip in xawtv window. * Note: you should not quit xawtv during recording or playing back. If you quit xawtv during recording or playback, another lavtools program will stop and may even crash. I'm not sure that the same will work for you. You can try but, please, be careful. WARNING! This is an experimental feature and I'm not sure if it will be supported in the future. The original driver was not designed to be used like this and it has no protection against any interference between two running programs. THEREFORE, IT IS POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS AND SINCE THE DRIVER OPERATES IN KERNEL SPACE, USING THIS FEATURE MAY CRASH YOUR ENTIRE SYSTEM. Features for testing ==================== When loaded, the driver creates a /proc/zoranX entry for each card: using 'cat /proc/zoran0' for your first card you can see the contents of ZR36057/67 chip registers. It is also possible to modify the contents of some registers directly. WARNING: modified contents is not stored in the driver memory, if you restart any program which uses this driver or even change position or cause redraw of a window of xawtv or other program, the original registers contents will be restored by the driver. However, it can be used to change ZR36067 registers on the fly for fine tuning and then to include these changes into driver code. This feature is very limited and still requires some documentation. However, if you are impatient, look at zoran_procfs.c code and (IMPORTANT!) read ZR36057/67 manual. To set TopField bit, for example, you need to type as root: echo TopField=1 > /proc/zoranX # change X to 0 for your first card, # 1 for second and so on... If you use this feature and have found some interesting result, please, let me know. Mailing lists ============= There are two mailing lists available to discuss application issues and suggest driver improvements: 1. A mailing list buz-linux was set up to discuss Iomega Buz driver. Since this driver is derivative of that driver, you can also post your questions and suggestions there. Subscribe with a message (with "subscribe" in the subject) to buz-linux-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Unsubscribe with a message (with "unsubscribe" in the subject) to buz-linux-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx The mailing list archive can be found at http://buz.webmages.com/list/. 2. Video4Linux mailing list is set for more general discussions related to uncompressed video capture, V4L and V4L2 API, many Video4Linux applications, etc. to subscribe to this mailing list, please, visit https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/video4linux-list
