FreeBSD BT848 / BT878 Driver

(also for NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi)

This site contains


This site is brought to you by the Transparent Telepresence Research Group,
Universiry of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
More information on the Telepresence Group can be found at http://www.telepresence.strath.ac.uk
and information on our usage of FreeBSD can be found at http://www.telepresence.strath.ac.uk/freebsd
 

Which Bt848 TV card to buy
I would prefer not to have to recomend one make of TV card over another.
Supporting cards with Mono sound only is usually quite easy. But when it comes to Stereo Sound, or when cards deviate from the reference design, I need to speak directly to the card manufacturers to obtain technical details (See Below for more on this issue)

I currently recommend Hauppauge and will shortly be able to recommend AVerMedia
Hauppauge
a) I bought one myself and have several different models at work,
b) I have email contact with Hauppauge Engineers (Ken and Fred),
c) They have good Windows Drivers including Windows NT (for Dual Boot users).

AVerMedia
a) I have email contact with an AVerMedia Engineer (Frank)
b) They also have good Windows Drivers including Windows NT drivers (for Dual Boot users).
Driver 1.74 contains code to auto-detect the tuner type but there are still problems with dual
language audio.
 

Why does the Tuner and/or Audio not work on some cards
Each Bt848/Bt878 card on the market can use one of several tuners.
Tuners are made by Philps or Temic and there are PAL and NTSC models
There is no way for the driver to determine which make and type of Tuner you have with probing. You need to
a) manually tell the driver which tuner type you have b) buy a card where the Tuner Type is stored in an EEPROM on the card. Only Hauppauge and AVerMedia do this at this time allowing the driver to autodetect the tuner.

For the audio there are many different ways to connect the Audio Multiplexor (Mux)
The Audio Mux selects Mono, Stereo, Mute, Left channel, Right Channel (for dual language TV), FM Radio and Line In audio sources.
It is sometimes possible to work out how this is connected by spying on the Windows 95/98 drivers as they run. This works best with Mono cards (those with no Stereo Sound decoder).

Without hardware details from the manufacturers there is alot of guesswork involved for the driver when controlling the Audio Mux.
As manufactuers add Stereo Support and FM Radio options the Audio Mux becomes more complicated.
Therefore I need contacts for each manufactuer. At this time I have contacts in Hauppauge and AVerMedia.

ATI All-in-Wonder Card
The ATI All-in-Wonder does not use a Bt848 or Bt878 so it needs its own driver. There is support for this card from the GATOS project. For more information goto
http://www.core.binghamton.edu/~insomnia/gatos/

 

NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi and FreeBSD
The driver is developed on my FreeBSD machines and committed to the FreeBSD source tree at regular intervals.
I do not run NetBSD, OpenBSD or BSDi myself.
However, several people have ported the driver to the other BSD systems and I accept their patches back into my driver.
If you have problems with NetBSD, OpenBSD or BSDi, I suggest you contact the following people:

For NetBSD, the driver is also checked into the NetBSD-current source tree.
Contact Thomas Klausner <wiz&danbala.ifoer.tuwien.ac.at> Berndt Wulf <wulf&ping.net.au>
Bernd Ernesti <bernd&arresum.inka.de> and Matthias Scheler <tron&zhadum.de>

For OpenBSD, Matthieu Herrb <Matthieu&laas.fr>

For BSDi, Tom <tom&toetag.com>
 
 
 

Driver Downloads

 VERSION 2.18 (Oct 2000)
Please download the driver from
ftp://telepresence.dmem.strath.ac.uk/pub/bt848/driver/2.18

Please read the README file carefully. The 2.xx driver is now located in
/usr/src/sys/dev/bktr. Users of older releases of FreeBSD may need to edit several
config files to install this driver. Full instructions are provided in the README.
 

VERSION 1.74 (17 September 1999)
This is the last of the 1.xx driver series and compiles on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
and BSDi.
Please download the driver from
ftp://telepresence.dmem.strath.ac.uk/pub/bt848/driver/1.74/

Please read the README file carefully.
 
 

Snapshot Beta Test Versions
You can find my development test drivers here.

Applications and Test Programs

TV Applications
FXTV can be found in the ports collection. The homepage is
http://www.freebsd.org/~rhh/fxtv Randall Hopper
email aa8vb&ipass.net
 

Sample applications
There are sample applications including a simple single frame grab to a PPM file (viewable with the XV program) in
ftp://telepresence.dmem.strath.ac.uk/pub/bt848/examples
 


Teletext
There is teletext capture and decoding support available.
There is also a new program called AleVT. This is a great multi-window Teletext program
and can be found in the ports tree at /usr/ports/misc/alevt

You can also use the vbidecode port and the videotext port
(both in /usr/ports/misc). vbidecode saves teletext pages to the hard disk as .vtx files
Videotext can then view and print the vtx files.
Finally, there is a Java VTX viewer in ftp://telepresence.dmem.strath.ac.uk/pub/bt848/teletext
 
 

Radio Applications
xmradio is now in the FreeBSD ports collection. The homepage is
http://BSDforge.com/projects/audio/adio Thomas Runge

Another application can be found at
ftp://login.dknet.dk/pub/fj Flemming Jacobsen
 
 

Web Cams and Web Camera Servers
There is a nice webcam server, for this *BSD bt848 driver, and for linux, at
http://cse.unl.edu/~jtravis/camserv.php3 which is written by Jon Travis jtravis&cse.unl.edu

There is also a program in the sample applications directory to grab frames and output them as JPEG images for you to stream yourself.


 
 

Documentation
Most of the chips/components on the TV cards come with publically available data sheets.
Datasheets for the Bt848/Bt849, B879/Bt879, Philips Tuners, Temic Tuners, Intetall MSP34xx audio chips can be found here
ftp://telepresence.dmem.strath.ac.uk/pub/bt848/spec
 
 

Juha Nurmela
Juha maintains an alternate Bt848 driver for FreeBSD along with some sample applications. More information can be found at
http://ukug.uk.freebsd.org/~juha
email Juha.Nurmela&quicknet.inet.fi
 

Linux
Sometimes I get asked about Linux, video and bt848s.
The best place to look for Linux resources is the Video 4 Linux and the Video 4 Linux Version 2 home pages and the linux bttv (bt848) driver pages.
Video 4 Linux pages from Alan Cox can be found at http://roadrunner.swansea.uk.linux.org/v4l.shtml
Video 4 Linux 2 pages from Bill Dirks can be found at http://millennium.diads.com/bdirks/v4l2.htm
The origianal BTTV driver (linux bt848/878 driver) can be found at Ralfs page http://www.thp.Uni-Koeln.DE/~rjkm/linux/bttv.html
The latest BTTV driver maintained by Gerd Knorr can be found at http://www.in-berlin.de/User/kraxel/bttv.html
Gerd also writes several Linux V4L apps inclusing xawtv, the linux version of FXTV.

Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT
Sometimes I get asked about Microsoft drivers, especially Windows NT drivers. Try the web site of your card manufacturer. If not, try and get the drivers from another manufacturers's site.
WARNING: This may crash your system or damage your TV card or PC
You could try
www.hauppauge.com (see http://www.hauppauge.com/html/sw_nt.htm) WinCastTV /WinTV/PCI drivers
www.avermedia.com (see http://www.avermedia.com/NTwares.htm)
but you may loose the Tuner support and/or Audio source selection.
 

Roger Hardiman, Strathclyde University Telepresence Group, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
roger&freebsd.org
See also: xmradio