Subjective maturity of tw6869, cx25821, bluecherry/softlogic drivers

[Nathaniel Bezanson <myself@telcodata.us>]

Hi all,

If this isn't the appropriate venue for this question, please gently steer me somewhere else. Thanks. :) I'm trying to head off the "well you shouldn't have bought *that* junk in the first place!" advice by doing some research ahead of time, and I'm here to check some assumptions.

I've been tasked with recommending a capture card for our hackerspace's video monitoring system. We'll be using motion so anything v4l/v4l2 is fair game. We presently have 8 cameras, but a 16-channel card wouldn't go to waste. Only quirk is the host system is PCI-Express only, no parallel PCI. 

I've found the much-lauded Bluecherry driver release in 2010: http://ben-collins.blogspot.com/2010/06/softlogic-6010-4816-channel-mpeg-4.html
It claims to be 90% functional, and I haven't found any updates since then. Am I looking in the wrong place or is this completely orphaned? Cards sometimes come up cheap and the board looks really well-thought-out, but as a hardware guy I'm the last person you want rooting around in driver source trying to solder some code together and get the last bits working...

I found the intersil/techwell TW6869 chip on a very affordable card, and there's a nice looking driver here: https://github.com/igorizyumin/tw6869/ Only trouble is there only seems to be the one card using it, and it's v1.0 hardware without robust ESD protection on the inputs; I don't know if I'd expect it to survive a decade connected to 200-foot camera leads. It's cheap enough to keep spare boards around, though. Is this driver solid? Is the chip? Are there other cards based on it?

I popped into #v4l on freenode, and was pointed to the cx25821 chip, which seems well supported but I can't find any actual names of cards that claim to use it, except possibly a line of Russian cards and maybe I can get a Russian-speaking friend to help figure out their shopping cart... Is there a known/recommended Cx25821-based card I should look for? (And is the 25853 similar?) 

I've seen talk of the older Geovision cards using the Bt878a chips, which is of course lovely, but I can't find any info on their PCIe offerings, nor even high-res photos of the board. That's a shame cuz their hardware looks really solid. Any chipset info? Anyone using these? 

Anything else I'm missing? 

Thanks a bunch in advance,
-Nate B-