Introduction

The original bttv-v4l2 driver has been more-or-less discontinued. bttv2 should be more reliable, and support most new cards. bttv-v4l2's component interface system is much cleaner though. You can find bttv-v4l2 here(NB. This is no longer supported!>.

This is still a somewhat experimental v4l2 driver for the Bt8[47][89] based video capture cards. This is a complete rewrite of the previous bttv-v4l2, using a large amount of common code from Gerd Knors bttv-0.7.x series v4l1 drivers. This means that all harware supported by the v4l1 drivers should work with these drivers.

This driver should still be considered alpha quality, but it seems pretty solid now (even doing heavy development work, I haven't managed to lock my machine up for the last couple of months now! - OK I have managed now with the experimental VBI support!). This is the driver for you if you require:
1) Frame-accurate time-stamping,
2) Multiple capture buffers,
3) Simultaneous capture and preview, or
4) V4L2 compatibility.
5) read() based video capture.
6) reliability (I hope!).
7) multiple simultaneous capture opens.
8) line by line vbi support.
and comming soon...
9) DMA to userspace.

The risc engine is designed to be completely synchronous. To the best of my knowledge, there are no possible deadlocks or races. This should make for a very reliable, robust capture engine. This project originated at Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Pretoria.

Disclaimer

Neither I, nor my employer accept any responsibility for what this software does to your computer, or any software or hardware on, or attached to it, although I have done my best to make sure that it does no damage.
THERE ARE NO GUARANTIES AT ALL! USE AT YOUR OWN RISC.

Credits:

Credits are due to a lot of people:

1) Ralph Metzler (rjkm@thp.uni-koeln.de) and Marcus Metzler (mocm@thp.uni-koeln.de) for the original bttv code on which this is based.

2) Gerd Knorr for the bttv-0.7.x series on which bttv2 is based.

3) Kyosti Malkki , for external component interface

4) Many, many people for audio and tuner drivers code.

5) Bill Dirks for an excellent capture API, and most of the coding for the modified API release.

Please also see the Changelog file - this documents who has fixed what bugs.

Known Problems:

Audio support is largely untested.

PLEASE REPORT ANY PROBLEMS TO justin@users.sourceforge.net.