FreeBSD and vid card

[dmwassman at cox.net]

Jack,

Yes, I have. Its not the best card to use for capture as the max rez is 320x240. Anything higher will get choppy but if you are doing a webcam or such it should be fine. To set it up, you will need to either put the bktr driver in your kernel or kernel load it at boot. The handbook as excellent instructions on this at:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/tvcard.html

Once the driver is loaded, you should have two new entries in /dev, bktr and bktr0. Both access the tv card. 

There is no tuner on the card so you don't have to worry about the channel it is set to just the input (S-video or Composite) it gets the signal from. This depends on the software you are going to use to capture the video. I am using an old machine (P2 400) to capture so I use NuppelVideo. I can say that this works great if all you want to do is record. My command line for NuppelVideo is:

nuvrec -n -S 0 -V /dev/bktr0 -A /dev/dsp0.0 file

-n NTSC
-S source (the README says it defaults to 0 but I cannot get a picture until I put this option in. Also this is for the composite port, I believe the S-video is 1)
-V video device
-A audio device
file Name of file for the recorded video. Don't put an extension on the file name as NuppelVideo will also put one on it automatically.

There is an excellent README on NuppelVideo website ( I think it also comes with the package/port). Here is the address:

http://frost.htu.tuwien.ac.at/~roman/nuppelvideo/

This creates a huge .nuv file (about 1G per hr) which I convert to avi using mencoder as well as change the aspect ratio to 640x480. End product is OK but a bit grainy.

Mencoder is part of mplayer and has excellent doc at:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html

You might want to do streaming (if you have a faster system and want a webcam, etc). I have read that ffmpeg will work great for this and has a streaming server but from here on, you are on your own as I have not used it. 

Hope this helps. Any other questions, just asks

David


> 
> From: Jack <jack at azmule.com>
> Date: 2005/07/31 Sun AM 01:22:38 EDT
> To: dmwassman at cox.net
> Subject: FreeBSD and vid card
> 
> Hi, I just found a ? you posted about captuering video with the intel 
> smart video III. Have you found the solution yet? I just started working 
> on getting the card up tonight. Rebuilt the box and installed fbsd 5.4.
> I purchased the intel creat and share a long time ago and have never made 
> use of it. My plan now is to get it up and running, use some kind of 
> motion detections IE: motion, to capture pic's of a chipmunk living 
> somewhere in the back yard. Any help would be great.
> thanks Jack
> 
>