BT848 is a low cost single-chip solution for analog NTSC/PAL/SECAM video capture on the PCI bus.
There are several PCI cards (frame grabbers) using this chip (45$ and up) and all of them can be driven by the same driver. The quality of the images is pretty good. In fact I did not notice any difference with images taken with a Matrox Meteor card.
I know about two different Linux drivers for BT848 based frame grabbers:
The BT848 driver was originally developed for FreeBSD operating system. (see also FreeBSD BT848 Driver Project).
The driver was ported under Linux by Brad Parker, maintaining the same user interface of the meteor driver, so that an application program can be written for running with either a BT848 based frame grabber or a Matrox Meteor card.
Meteor driver allows for DMA transfer of images into main memory and
for notifying the application program with a signal whenever a frame
(or a field) has been transfered. This is very useful for efficient
image processing.
Unfortunately, I did not manage to make use of this feature with the original
bt848 driver. I was forced to give a look at the code and to learn how
a Linux driver works and how to fix the problem.
The actual driver implements DMA transfer of images and signal notification,
exactly as the meteor driver.
Multiple frame capture ioctls are not implemented.
I did not test it with any tuner card or multiple cards.
I did not test it on other architectures but a PC.
The driver versions 0.3 and 0.4 seem not to work with chip BT848KPF,
while they work fine with chip BT848AKPF.
BT848 driver
New versions of the driver can be found in http://robots.activmedia.com/bt8xx/
Application programs
Please send any comment to Luca Iocchi ( iocchi@dis.uniroma1.it).
URL: http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~iocchi/bt848/
Last update: Feb 14, 2000.
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