Pico2000

PICO2000 DVR card

The cheapest DVR card. With all 4 channels capturing you'll get around 2 fps. Available under lots of different brand names, like "Star Imavision Video Capture", etc... Generally stated as "Pico2000 compatible"

This card uses a single Conexant 878A chip. It is a 4 Camera Security PCI Card.

Compression : MPEG4. Display Resolution: 352 x 240 (NTSC). Screen Display: 1/4/7/10/13/16 multi-view or full screen. Network: Remote Monitoring and Recording with Search and Playback. Upgradeable - 4 cards in a PC for 16 cameras. Minimum PC capability: Pentium III 800 MHz or equivalent.

Configuration

in /etc/modprobe.conf

For one card:

options bttv card=77 tuner=4 radio=0 triton1=0 vsfx=0 autoload=0

For two cards:

options bttv card=77,77 tuner=4,4 radio=0,0 triton1=0 vsfx=0 autoload=0

And so on...

Also, if during bootup your system hangs for 5 minutes or more at "Setting clock (utc)": add this before options bttv

options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1

Conexant Fusion 878A

The Conexant Fusion 878A chip is a recent incarnation of the Brooktree Bt878A chip. The booktree Bt878A is successor to the well known Bt848. The Bt848 was designed by Brooktree, which is now Conexant. This chip is common on video capture cards and cctv cards.

Why do we mention this? Because this is the chip on the Pico PCI CCTV card. This is also a chip commonly used on many video capture devices, TV cards, and is supported by a wide range of video capture software. However, video capture software supporting Bt878A that is not designed for CCTV will likely only allow you to access one camera port at a time.

http://wiki.robotz.com/images/d/da/Conexantfusion878A.png