Nimrod

Newsflash, the BTinstaller for bt878 cards is exactly the same from sourceforge BTwinCap, active Webcam, and H264 Webcam. Blue Iris does not provide anything. They are all version 5.38 with identical screens. Furthermore I have found out that none of the surveillance programs when used with the bt878 card supports adjustment of color, hue, saturation, or brightness. I have tested Active Webcam, H264 webcam, and Blue Iris.

Capture card is a 4 input 1 chip bt878 type, currently have a PV-140 installed. http://www.provideo.com.tw/manual/En/VPRO/VPROInstallManual_V2_7_1102.pdf

Soundy, I tried to change the saturation level but it is grayed out in all 3 programs, AmCap, Active Webcam and Blue Iris. And as I said before all 3 programs have the same menus. I looked around to see if there was some way to enable the menus but no luck. And I did look for B/W only settings I could not find any. I do have 1 idea but need some guidance on how to do it. Blue Iris has an option to install video filters, I suspect if I find the right one it will give me the control I need. But at the moment I am unsure exactly what or where these video filter programs are. I will start googling after I post this message.

In the past i have set up 16 camera systems with windows XP using 4 pieces of 1 chip 4 input cards, framerate was about 7fps on each channel. The software was IQ eyes.

The bt878 driver install from Active webcam worked OK for me for Blue Iris. However I only tried 1 camera out of 4. To set up Blue Iris for bt878 camera Right click on Blue Iris Main screen and select add new camera. New camera screen comes up, select video tab. On this screen select USB Firewire or Analog. Drop down box labeled input is available now. Select each of the video composite inputs until you see a picture. The only other thing I did after I had a picture was change the resolution in same tab to 640 x 480 from 320 x 240.

Update to color artifact problem. I tried a name brand PV-140 4 input bt878 card with exactly the same results. What I am finding is that any ware there is a sharp focus on a vertical line I get the color artifacts. As a test I tried different types of lighting and all I found out was the brighter the light the brighter the artifacts. On this picture I focused on a box that was 3 feet from the camera and the lighting was a little brighter there. Notice how the color artifacts follow the vertical lines on the box

I have not tried Blue Iris yet, but the install from the demo Active Webcam has a BTinstaller utility that may work for you. You run it the first time and select remove all BT878 drivers and then run it again and choose install BT878 drivers. The file is an exe in the Active webcam directory. In the next day or 2 I hope to try Blue Iris, maybe we can help each other out. I also want to use IP and analog cams also. I just ran my installer again. Make sure when installing the driver you select generic 4 input card and no TV tuner.

There is a sticky here that addresses this topic, it’s kind of a sore spot having this same question asked over and over. But I am actually working on the same problem you have and have spent the last week researching what software to use with this card. After looking over more than 50 different software packages, I came up with these top 3 contenders for inexpensive software and I am starting to demo them now. These are all modern programs and support windows 7. http://www.pysoft.com/ActiveWebCamMainpage.htm $30 http://www.h264soft.com/ $50 http://www.blueirissoftware.com/ $50 There is also the free linux Zoneminder program but it only uses half the resolution of the camera, because it throws out every other line of the interlaced image. Your other alternative is a dedicated hardware DVR. A quality 4 channel unit would be about as much as a computer, many people on this board can help you pick out a good model.

Just found this Bosch pdf for Selecting the Right CCTV Camera. http://www.boschsecurity.us/NR/rdonlyres/1A4F9B44-0376-4FC8-A735-151F02021082/0/SelectingtheRightCCTVCamera.pdf It has 16 jam packed pages on types of cameras, lenses, focal lengths, settings, etc. This document is a great primer for the how to do i set up a system question, minus the recording end of it.

I have been researching the use of DVR cards in a computer to use for surveillance. And after reading this document here. http://www.initsys.net/attachments/Compression%20and%20DigitisationPDF.pdf JPEG2000, MJPEG, MPEG and H.264 in the security environment. By Christopher Berry. It seems it is next to impossible to put a useable system together. With all the manufactures jumping on the H.264 bandwagon there is no Jpeg, Jpeg 2000, or wavelet DVR boards left that I could find. Geovision dumped their wavelet at the end of 2006 Essentially what the article points out is that H.264 is a video standard for displaying motion. And in 1 second of video there are only 2 frames with the full video information. This means if you record at 30 FPS you can only play back 2 of the frames in one second of recording going frame by frame for identification, and this is far to infrequent to catch much happening even at a slow walk. In my opinion 7 or 8 FPS is barely usable. Also Jpeg is required for legal court video, another reason H.264 is bad. I was hoping to find a hardware accelerated card with some form of Jpeg support that would de-interlace the NTSC image and give me 640x480 or D1 output. With my choice of 10 to 30 FPS and up to 16 cameras. In the last week I have read a lot of posts on this board. There are clearly a lot of informed people here. How are you getting around this problem? Thank you Nimrod

“Long story short: don't get too worked up about it My experience with H.264 playback at lower framerates is, it does frame-by-frame just fine.” OK that clears up some misconceptions I had. From the article I thought all frames were thrown out except for the 2 key frames for frame by frame playback. I also found some white papers from several universities on Jpeg 2000 vs H.264 and there is no clear winner. The best image depends on various circumstances not what codec was used. I suspect what is going on here is that H.264 is “good enough” and has far superior compression than Jpeg 2000. This solves the big problem of storage size for larger systems and newly emerging megapixel cameras. Nimrod