Hauppauge ImpactVCB-e 01381 PCIe driver resolution.

Hauppauge ImpactVCB-e 01381 PCIe driver resolution.

[Steve Cookson]

Hi Guys,

I seem to be having immense difficulty getting the Hauppauge ImpactVCB-e 
01381 PCIe card working on Linux (I'm using Kubuntu 13.04) with greater 
than 320x240 resolution.

This is what I've done:

lspci recognises the card but only as a Conexant card (Vendor ID = 
14f1:8852), not Hauppauge card (Vendor ID = 0070).  Hauppauge is shown 
as the subsystem (0070:7133).  I don't really know what this means.

lsmod returns nothing related to the card.

dmesg  | grep cx23885 suggested card=<n> insmod option (full output from 
dmesg below).  So I did:

echo cx23885 card=5 | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

So I tried a few version numbers, but they all give me 320x240 in 
s-video or composite mode.

If I use a Pinnacle Dazzle, I get perfect 640x480 for about the same 
price.  But I need an internal PCIe card, rather than a external card/box.

How can I add the card to video4Linux?

Any help much appreciated.

Regards

Steve




   8.921332] cx23885 driver version 0.0.3 loaded
[    8.921390] cx23885[0]: Your board isn't known (yet) to the driver.
[    8.921390] cx23885[0]: Try to pick one of the existing card configs via
[    8.921390] cx23885[0]: card=<n> insmod option.  Updating to the latest
[    8.921390] cx23885[0]: version might help as well.
[    8.921393] cx23885[0]: Here is a list of valid choices for the 
card=<n> insmod option:
[    8.921395] cx23885[0]:    card=0 -> UNKNOWN/GENERIC
[    8.921396] cx23885[0]:    card=1 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1800lp
[    8.921397] cx23885[0]:    card=2 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1800
[    8.921398] cx23885[0]:    card=3 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1250
[    8.921399] cx23885[0]:    card=4 -> DViCO FusionHDTV5 Express
[    8.921400] cx23885[0]:    card=5 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1500Q
[    8.921401] cx23885[0]:    card=6 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1500
[    8.921402] cx23885[0]:    card=7 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1200
[    8.921403] cx23885[0]:    card=8 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1700
[    8.921404] cx23885[0]:    card=9 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1400
[    8.921405] cx23885[0]:    card=10 -> DViCO FusionHDTV7 Dual Express
[    8.921406] cx23885[0]:    card=11 -> DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual 
Express
[    8.921407] cx23885[0]:    card=12 -> Leadtek Winfast PxDVR3200 H
[    8.921408] cx23885[0]:    card=13 -> Compro VideoMate E650F
[    8.921409] cx23885[0]:    card=14 -> TurboSight TBS 6920
[    8.921410] cx23885[0]:    card=15 -> TeVii S470
[    8.921411] cx23885[0]:    card=16 -> DVBWorld DVB-S2 2005
[    8.921412] cx23885[0]:    card=17 -> NetUP Dual DVB-S2 CI
[    8.921413] cx23885[0]:    card=18 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1270
[    8.921414] cx23885[0]:    card=19 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1275
[    8.921415] cx23885[0]:    card=20 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1255
[    8.921416] cx23885[0]:    card=21 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1210
[    8.921417] cx23885[0]:    card=22 -> Mygica X8506 DMB-TH
[    8.921418] cx23885[0]:    card=23 -> Magic-Pro ProHDTV Extreme 2
[    8.921419] cx23885[0]:    card=24 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1850
[    8.921420] cx23885[0]:    card=25 -> Compro VideoMate E800
[    8.921421] cx23885[0]:    card=26 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1290
[    8.921422] cx23885[0]:    card=27 -> Mygica X8558 PRO DMB-TH
[    8.921424] cx23885[0]:    card=28 -> LEADTEK WinFast PxTV1200
[    8.921425] cx23885[0]:    card=29 -> GoTView X5 3D Hybrid
[    8.921426] cx23885[0]:    card=30 -> NetUP Dual DVB-T/C-CI RF
[    8.921427] cx23885[0]:    card=31 -> Leadtek Winfast PxDVR3200 H XC4000
[    8.921428] cx23885[0]:    card=32 -> MPX-885
[    8.921429] cx23885[0]:    card=33 -> Mygica X8502/X8507 ISDB-T
[    8.921430] cx23885[0]:    card=34 -> TerraTec Cinergy T PCIe Dual
[    8.921431] cx23885[0]:    card=35 -> TeVii S471
[    8.921432] cx23885[0]:    card=36 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1255
[    8.921433] cx23885[0]:    card=37 -> Prof Revolution DVB-S2 8000
[    8.921434] cx23885[0]:    card=38 -> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR4400
[    8.921435] cx23885[0]:    card=39 -> AVerTV Hybrid Express Slim HC81R
[    8.921526] CORE cx23885[0]: subsystem: 0070:7133, board: 
UNKNOWN/GENERIC [card=0,autodetected]
[    9.047515] cx23885_dev_checkrevision() Hardware revision = 0xa5
[    9.047518] cx23885[0]/0: found at 0000:03:00.0, rev: 4, irq: 18, 
latency: 0, mmio: 0xfbe00000

Re: Hauppauge ImpactVCB-e 01381 PCIe driver resolution.

[Steve Cookson]

Hi Devin,

Thanks for responding.

So my question would be then, is it worth fixing?

I can't find any PCIe cards that give me a reasonable quality.

If I use an external card like the Dazzle it seems quite fast and better 
quality than many s-video cards.

Could the ImpactVCB-e be better than the Dazzle?

Regards

Steve.



On 15/09/2013 17:26, Devin Heitmueller wrote:
 >
 >
 > On Sep 15, 2013 11:35 AM, "Steve Cookson" <it@sca-uk.com> wrote:
 > >
 > > Hi Guys,
 > >
 > > I seem to be having immense difficulty getting the Hauppauge 
ImpactVCB-e 01381 PCIe card working on Linux (I'm using Kubuntu 13.04) 
with greater than 320x240 resolution.
 > >
 > > This is what I've done:
 > >
 > > lspci recognises the card but only as a Conexant card (Vendor ID = 
14f1:8852), not Hauppauge card (Vendor ID = 0070). Hauppauge is shown as 
the subsystem (0070:7133).  I don't really know what this means.
 > >
 > > lsmod returns nothing related to the card.
 > >
 > > dmesg  | grep cx23885 suggested card=<n> insmod option (full output 
from dmesg below).  So I did:
 > >
 > > echo cx23885 card=5 | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
 > >
 > > So I tried a few version numbers, but they all give me 320x240 in 
s-video or composite mode.
 > >
 > > If I use a Pinnacle Dazzle, I get perfect 640x480 for about the 
same price.  But I need an internal PCIe card, rather than a external 
card/box.
 > >
 > > How can I add the card to video4Linux?
 > >
 > > Any help much appreciated.
 > >
 > > Regards
 > >
 > l believe the scaler is broken in the cx23885 driver.  I did a bunch 
of work on the driver last year to fix a variety of bugs, but didn't get 
around to making the scaler work properly.  Most likely the card only 
works right at it's max resolution (720x480 for NTSC or 720x576 for PAL).
 >
 > It can probably be made to work with a few hour's worth of debugging, 
but I didn't have a commercial customer at the time who needed it and as 
far as I know nobody else is working on it.
 >
 > Devin

Re: Hauppauge ImpactVCB-e 01381 PCIe driver resolution.

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Steve Cookson <it@sca-uk.com> wrote:
> Hi Devin,
>
> Thanks for responding.
>
> So my question would be then, is it worth fixing?
>
> I can't find any PCIe cards that give me a reasonable quality.
>
> If I use an external card like the Dazzle it seems quite fast and better
> quality than many s-video cards.
>
> Could the ImpactVCB-e be better than the Dazzle?

Hi Steve,

Whether it's worth fixing, it's largely a question of "worth it to
whom"?  Apparently nobody had noticed it was broken until now, hence
making it questionable how important it is to the general community.

It's worth noting that the problem isn't specific to the ImpactVCB-e;
it would happen with any cx23885 based board.

The quality will probably be comparable to the Dazzle.  In terms of
"quite fast", they should both be the exact same speed since they are
both delivering raw video in realtime.  One key advantage of the
ImpactVCB-e is that you can have multiple installed in a single
system, while in the case of the Dazzle you will likely only be able
to use one device since it uses more than half of the USB bus
bandwidth.

I'm not sure what other cards you've tried.  Nowadays they should all
deliverable comparable performance for s-video (since no chroma
separation is involved), if they don't then it's almost certainly a
Linux driver bug.

If you have a commercial need for the device to work, we can discuss
offlist doing some consulting to resolve the issue.  However if not
then you're pretty much at the mercy of the community in terms of the
state of quality/support.

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com

Re: Hauppauge ImpactVCB-e 01381 PCIe driver resolution.

[Steve Cookson]

On 16/09/2013 14:38, Devin Heitmueller wrote:

 >
 > I'm not sure what other cards you've tried.  Nowadays they should all
 > deliverable comparable performance for s-video (since no chroma
 > separation is involved), if they don't then it's almost certainly a
 > Linux driver bug.
 >
 > If you have a commercial need for the device to work, we can discuss
 > offlist doing some consulting to resolve the issue.  However if not
 > then you're pretty much at the mercy of the community in terms of the
 > state of quality/support.

Well I'm not sure whether I have a commercial need yet.

What I really want is a fast, analogue RGBS 480i & 1080i capture card.

Maybe like the Epiphan VGA2USB LR (internal version), but it is sooo
expensive.

For 25% of the price I can get a Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro, but
it only does YPbPr 1080i and the decklinksrc gstreamer module is a
bit ropey.  Actually very ropey.  But it also accepts s-video.

So then I fall back on the old tried and tested s-video stuff.  I have to
accept 480i but I can still have a fast response.  Dazzle is about 100
msecs but some others, like the old ImpactVCB pci card with
3 av ports and an s-video port, has worse quality video than the Dazzle
and is slower.  I've tested another couple of PCI cards but they are all
very slow and poor video quality.

The one I'd really like, at about $100 on Amazon, is the Startech
VGA capture card, I could put a synch splitter/inverter in front of it, for
say $25, to convert RGB3 1080i to VGA HD1080.  It runs like a dream
with a fast response.  It's Linux compatible as far as I can see, that
is to say lspci should say something if you plug it in, but there is no
driver for it.  The one I saw, which was not the Startech one but a
similar one from Kato vision, was PCIe, with onboard h.264
hardware compression and a direct memory access module.  It
just screamed through that video signal.  I wasn't able to do any timer 
tests
on it, but I would guess much faster than the dazzle.  Maybe 50 msecs
latency.

Regards

Steve

 >
 > Devin
 >

Re: Hauppauge ImpactVCB-e 01381 PCIe driver resolution.

[Devin Heitmueller]

Hi Steve,

> What I really want is a fast, analogue RGBS 480i & 1080i capture card.

Raw HD capture is essentially non-existent under Linux.  We have a
couple of closed source drivers, none of which are cost effective for
non-commercial applications (we have drivers for a couple of Avermedia
HDMI/component capture cards).

> Maybe like the Epiphan VGA2USB LR (internal version), but it is sooo
> expensive.
>
> For 25% of the price I can get a Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro, but
> it only does YPbPr 1080i and the decklinksrc gstreamer module is a
> bit ropey.  Actually very ropey.  But it also accepts s-video.
>
> So then I fall back on the old tried and tested s-video stuff.  I have to
> accept 480i but I can still have a fast response.  Dazzle is about 100
> msecs but some others, like the old ImpactVCB pci card with
> 3 av ports and an s-video port, has worse quality video than the Dazzle
> and is slower.  I've tested another couple of PCI cards but they are all
> very slow and poor video quality.

The "slow" aspect is probably just a misconfiguration in the number of
buffers the V4L2 driver delivers.  All of the cards should support a
minimum of two buffers, which would put latency at 60ms.  Anything
greater is probably the application doing some prebuffering.

> The one I'd really like, at about $100 on Amazon, is the Startech
> VGA capture card, I could put a synch splitter/inverter in front of it, for
> say $25, to convert RGB3 1080i to VGA HD1080.  It runs like a dream
> with a fast response.  It's Linux compatible as far as I can see, that
> is to say lspci should say something if you plug it in, but there is no
> driver for it.

To be clear, the fact that it shows up in lspci is absolutely no
indicator of being Linux compatible.  It just means the device
conforms to the PCI standard and can thus the hardware can be
enumerated.

> The one I saw, which was not the Startech one but a
> similar one from Kato vision, was PCIe, with onboard h.264
> hardware compression and a direct memory access module.  It
> just screamed through that video signal.  I wasn't able to do any timer
> tests
> on it, but I would guess much faster than the dazzle.  Maybe 50 msecs
> latency.

Are you using the same application for capture in both cases?  They
really shouldn't behave any differently.

Raw video is essentially no latency since the card typically doesn't
have enough memory to do any buffering (unlike compressed video where
you can have latency of several seconds depending on the encoder
used).  Any latency you are seeing is either in the driver or the
application.

Cheers,

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com