Hello,

Is there any difference between the image quality of a cheap 4 port single chip ebay card compared to one of the more expensive 4 chip cards ?

Also are there any issues with running 2 cards in the same PC ?

Thanks,

L

I don't believe the capture cards on ebay support more then one capture card per computer.

We sell capture cards (so does ituner) that you can install up to 4 of the same cards in the same computer. (The cards are usually referred to as 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D') and have to be followed in that order if installing more then one card in a computer)

You can contact me off the list for more information or http://www.bluecherry.net/store/catalog ... Path=33_44

Most of the ebay cards do support having multiple cards in one machine. I currenlty have two systems setup with two cards each and no problems. I have also been able to setup one of them with three Hauppauge 64405 with no trouble (since I have 10 of these cards). I haven't tried putting more than two of the ebay type cards in one system though.
The differance between the multichip cards and the single is that on the single chip cards the settings for images on all the ports on the card must be the same (image size, colour pallet) and a lower frame rate as all the ports share the one chip that has to switch internaly where as the multichip cards have a chip dedicated to each port in most cases. The other case whould be that a four chip card may have eight inputs so inputs would be paired to a chip so that you would have two cameras to a chip so each pair would have to share simular settings.
Regards,
Cordel

I bought one of those 8port capture cards on ebay. It has 8 bt878's in it and works fine with other single bt878 cards.

I have 3 cards working without any problems.
These cards have 1 bt878 chip and 4 inputs.
I haven't tried 4 cards.

These are the cards:
http://allegro.pl/show_item.php?item=53312473

One of our developers rewrote the driver for the BT878 cards so that we can have up to 6 four port cards installed and not have to worry about A,B,C,D types.

We normally use all A type cards.

Thinking outside of the box does actually work...

Regards,

Deano

That's interesting. I always thought the A, B, C & D types were due to being fixed PCI port addresses or something, and not bttv related.

Phil

Hi Phil,

A few replies to you today.

As I recall what he did was write a driver that asked each card if it had either a 878 or a controller and if it came back with the 878 response then he knew it had four ports which he could directly access and if it came back with the controller chip then he assumed that it had four of the 878 (ie fast card) and he knew how to address them also.

We are going to try a 16 port card sometime (ie 16 slow ports) and see what his driver says about that card.

As I am not a programmer (I am a hardware man) this is a simple as I can put it from memory.

Regards,

Deano