Zoneminder and multichannel cards

[Achilleas Mantzios]

Στις Πέμπτη 04 Οκτώβριος 2007 18:37, ο/η Mark Tinguely έγραψε:
> >  I have successfully (and painfully!) managed to get correct quality
> > video out of ZoneMinder zoneminder-1.22.3, on 6.2-RELEASE-p4 with the
> > LMLBT4M card. (card info on
> > http://www.linuxmedialabs.com/product_details.php?prodid=320).
> >
> >  However i cant instantiate a second instance of the video capture daemon
> > of zoneminder (zmc), because of a "/dev/bktr0: Device busy" error.
> >
> >  Is it possible to open /dev/bktr0 from two programms at the same time?
>
> No, the bktr(4) driver is written so that only one open is active at a
> time.

I dont know if you are familiar with zoneminder,
it has a capture daemon (zmc) which is used to grab the video.

In the installation we have at work under linux, using a 4-chip board 
(LMLBT44), i can see that there are only 4
instances of it (zmc) running 
on /dev/video0,/dev/video1,/dev/video2,/dev/video3
to capture all 8 cameras.
This board supports 4 full rate inputs, or 8 multiplexed inputs.

So for each one of the 4 chips, the corresponding zmc daemon is used
to simultaneously capture both channels (cameras) of the same chip.

Theoritically is that possible with FreeBSD's bktr driver?
Could we have an app like lets say xawtv to display all (4 in my case) 
channels of a multiplexer board like LMLBT4M which utilizes only one 878 chip 
and supports 4 multiplexed channels i.e. 4 cameras?

If your answer is yes, then i should keep on trying with 
FreeBSD/ZoneMinder/zmc, etc...
Else i should buy 3 additional bt 878 cards, or switch to linux which i want 
to avoid!

Thanx for any info.
>
> --Mark Tinguely.

-- 
Achilleas Mantzios