[AG-TECH] Issues with a new AG 3.1 installation.

[Miguel Sáez]

Hello again,

After a few more trys with Fedora 9 i just gave up and installed Windows 
XP but i got new annoying issues, seems my Access Grid 3.1 installation 
can't recognize my video capturer devices.

First i installed them with the own drivers from Pinnacle and then i 
installed the open source ones (http://btwincap.sourceforge.net) but 
still the same problem.
I know this problem comes from the 2.4 version but i thought it was 
fixed in 3.1 versions but seems not or else im doing something wrong. 
The only device i can get is called something like 'Microsoft WDM Image 
Capture (Win32)', then i add 4 of those, i connect to the venue, the 4 
vics gets launched and well doesn't work at all as i get errors telling 
me that im trying to use the same device... OK, VIC itself recognizes 
the 4 cards but if i try to change the device i want to use there it 
just crashes... Checking old mails i got this link 
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/web-mail-archive/lists/ag-tech/2005/04/msg00175.html 
but, don't know if its fixed already for 3.1 or not, can anyone confirm 
this?.

And now, i just installed Ubuntu 8.04 (kernel: 2.6.24) and i get exactly 
the same errors as i did with Fedora 9, so i guess it isn't a OS issue 
nor software configuration or drivers... afterall it might be that my 
hardware can't handle 4x H264 with mpeg4?.

Any help with the Windows installation is my priority at the moment as i 
want just to test it under Windows and see what happens!.

Thanks a lot of the support, any help will be really much appreciated,

Miguel Sáez escribió:
> Hello,
>
> I have been doing some tests today, the first one was with V4L who 
> didn't work at all.
>
> Then i did some tests changing the video parameters such as fps, 
> encoding and size of the video streams with V4L2.
> At the moment seems the computer i'm using as AG Video with the 4 
> capturers can't handle it;
>
> - With H.264 (mpeg4) at 24fps and video size large, one of the cameras 
> freezes in about 5min max.
> - With H.264 (mpeg4) at 24fps and video size normal, one of the 
> cameras freezes in about 10-15min.
> - With H.264 (mpeg4) at 24fps and video size small, everything worked 
> without any problem for 1'5 hours.
> - With H.264 (mpeg4) at 3fps and video size large, everything worked.
> Also did the same tests listed above marking h264 as encoder, same 
> results.
>
> After those tests i tried with H.261 at 24fps and everything worked fine.
>
> When i did the tests i also looked at the %CPU used with the 'top' 
> command and each vic process (H.264 @ mpeg4, 24fps, large size) were 
> using between 80%-90% of the CPU and with for example H.261 doesn't 
> really use more than 1% of the CPU each vic proccess. So that's what i 
> guess my computer can't handle it, so ... no i'm asking what kind of 
> computer do you need to be able to support 4 video capturers at H.264?.
>
> The computer i'm using is a: 2x Dual Intel Xeon @ 2.80GHz, 2GB Ram and 
> a 160GB HDD.
>
> Greetings.
>
> Douglas Kosovic escribió:
>> Hi Miguel,
>>
>> Now that I think about it, if you are capturing four 720x576 PAL 
>> video streams, you're most likely hitting PCI bus saturation issues. 
>> The four Pinnacle PCTV PCI capture cards would be sharing the limited 
>> PCI bus bandwidth (as most motherboards don't have independent PCI 
>> buses for each of the PCI slots). PCI has a peak bandwidth of 127MB/s 
>> and depending on the fps capture rate, would leave just 8 MB/s leeway.
>>
>> One workaround might be to not select 'large' on all the video 
>> streams, or use a PCI-e x1 Bt878 quad-input capture card which are 
>> starting to get cheaper.
>>
>> I might even add some code to vic which stops the vic capture, then 
>> sleeps for a period of time and restarts the capture if the 
>> VIDIOC_DQBUF I/O error happens more than a 100 times in a row.
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Doug
>>
>> Douglas Kosovic wrote:
>>> Hi Miguel,
>>>
>>> You might like to try setting the VideoProducers to V4L instead of 
>>> V4L2 and see if you get similar issues.
>>>
>>> Sorry I'm not sure what the cause of the issue is, but will try to 
>>> reproduce next week.
>>>
>>>
>>> Doug
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov on behalf of Miguel Sáez
>>> Sent: Fri 5/16/2008 9:37 PM
>>> To: AG-TECH list
>>> Subject: [AG-TECH] Issues with a new AG 3.1 installation.
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I'm currently testing a new AcessGrid 3.1 installation with 2 
>>> computers;
>>> - The first one is a Linux Fedora Core 9 (kernel: 2.6.25.3-18.fc9.i686)
>>> with 4 video capturers connected to 4 cameras. This computer is working
>>> as H264 video producer with a Service Manager launched.
>>> The 4 video capturers are Pinnacle PCTV Rave (chipset: Conexant FUSION
>>> 878A).
>>> - The last computer is under Windows XP SP3 working as a H264 video
>>> consumer.
>>>
>>> I start the AGServiceManager on the linux computer and then on the
>>> windows computer i launch my venue client and i configure there the
>>> consumer and producer video services. When i connect to my venue
>>> everything works fine; vic gets launched i can see all the videos
>>> perfectly and smooth but after a few time, (about 20-30min) one of the
>>> cameras freezes completly (it's random the camera that freezes) and i
>>> start getting the same error all the time in the console where i
>>> launched the ServiceManager:
>>>
>>> ioctl VIDIOC_DQBUF: Input/output error
>>>
>>> Also if i check the dmesg output i get errors there, for all the other
>>> devices (bttv1, bttv2 and bttv3):
>>>
>>> bttv0: SCERR @ 369d9000,bits: HSYNC OFLOW FBUS SCERR*
>>> bttv0: timeout: drop=41 irq=114623/114624, risc=369d9000, bits: HSYNC
>>> OFLOW FBUS:
>>>
>>> I have checked if the video capturer cards where being loaded with the
>>> right module and driver and seems they are.
>>>
>>> At this point i don't what else i should check or do, so if anyone 
>>> got a
>>> clue about what's wrong any kind of help would be appreciated.
>>>
>>> Greetings,
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>


-- 
====================================================
Miguel Ángel Sáez Llorente
Técnico de Comunicacións
 
Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA)
Avenida de Vigo, s/n (Campus Sur)
15705 Santiago de Compostela - ESPAÑA
 
E-mail:      msaez at cesga.es
Tel:         +34  981 56 98 10 (ext. 246)
Fax:         +34  981 59 46 16
Web:         http://www.cesga.es/
====================================================