I've got to set up an installation which processes video from a remote camera over a wireless 2.4GHz sender. This outputs to Composite video (the yellow phono plug).

Currently I've got no hardware on my linux box which can take in composite video and feed it to PD so I need to buy one.

I'd like some advice on cost-effective capture cards which people have tried and are known to have worked (at least once - I know there are no guarantees here).

So has anyone succeeded in taking in Composite video from an outside video source into PD (GEM) on linux, and what capture card did they use?

I'm running latest Debian on regular commodity intel box.

some infos here :
http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/gem-dev/2007-03/002615.html

For some reason I can't get to that address. The server may be out.

Can't pick up that particular page on the wayback machine either (http://archive.org).

Hopefully the server will come back, but if it doesn't and you remember the device names that would be very handy.

PCI based capture cards using the BT 848 or 878 chips are well supported. They should have low CPU load with 640x480 capture.

can you post links to some examples, like on newegg or other online vendor?

hi all.

for a project we're working on at the moment, we've been looking for a usb video composite capture card that would work with pd/GEM on Linux OS. we bought a Pinnacle PCTV USB2 that works fine on Linux with the usbvision driver, but somehow crashes GEM. we've posted the error log on the pd and gem-dev list, with no luck until now. so here it is again in case someone around here can help :

we want to use [pix_video] with a USB video capture device (Pinnacle PCTV USB2). But when we send [1( to [pix_video], pd says :

GEM: Start rendering
pix_videoNEW: starting transfer
cap: name Pinnacle PCTV USB 2 type 3 channels 3 maxw 720 maxh 576 minw 48 minh 32
picture: brightness 32896 depth 21571 palette 8
channel 0 name Television type 1 flags 1
channel 1 name Composite1 type 2 flags 0
channel 2 name S-Video type 2 flags 0
setting to channel 1
closing video
pix_texture: not using client storage

and all that we can see is a white rectangle.

XTerm is saying : VIDIOCGMBUF: Invalid argument

When we stop rendering with [0(, pd crashes.

we're on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS with Pd 0.39-2 / GEM 0.90. The USB video capture device is a Pinnacle PCTV Analog USB2

we had no trouble for getting the box to work with the video4linux drivers.
It works well with TVTime, but not with GEM. It seems everything goes well (using pix_videoNEW, listing the video channels, choosing the good one), and then this message "closing video". Why ?

we've tried the patch on Windows XP and have no problems with [pix_video] with this video capture device.

Any ideas ?

I get the same crash when stopping rendering on Ubuntu 6.10, even when all is well with the video connection. It just doesn't like it.

Also I can't get a DigiTV card to show composite video properly - shows up as black and white corrupted sort of video instead, as if it's trying to read in Composite Video as S-Video, and I can't get the card to switch the input type.

I switched to a Mercury PCI TV card I had knocking around, and it works well.

I think it's important to fire the proper channel to get it to pick up the video correctly. I tried a few different channel values before I got anything visible at all.

look for a board that mount a "saa7130" by philips... there's a module called saa7130 in linux and it works perfectly... I used a Lifeview board