Re: Multiple DV devices on one Firewire card

Edmund Humenberger wrote:
> We want to grab live multiple digital videostreams coming from 
> multiple Canopus ADVC55 Firewire DV grabbers.
> 
> Firewire does support 400Mbit, and one Canopus does generate 28 MBit.
> So running 3 Canopus devcies on one PCU card should be no problem at
> all.
> 
> The problem is that we can only run one Canopus device per
> PCI Firewire card, even when the Firewire card has 3 Wirewire
> interfaces.

If this card has a single link layer controller (most cards do; only a
few special-purpose cards are built with two or four link layer
controllers) then the three ports belong to the same bus.  If in doubt,
"lspci" will confirm this.

If you want more than 2 DV streams on a single bus, then they have to
run at S200 or S400 while S100 would become unreliable, according to
http://lists.apple.com/archives/Firewire/2004/Oct/msg00033.html .  But
ADVC55 stream only at S100, according to according to
http://desktop.grassvalley.com/products/ADVC55/.

> DVgrab does not offer any option to decide from what port on the
> PCI card the video should be taken.

Try the -guid option of dvgrab --- first with only two ADVC55, and if
you get this to work, with three of them.  GUIDs are listed in
/sys/bus/{ieee1394,firewire}/devices/ and in the kernel log.  One of the
GUIDs belongs to the card of course.
-- 
Stefan Richter
-=====-=-=== -=-= -==-=
http://arcgraph.de/sr/

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