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

Ben Green ben.green at manchester.ac.uk
Fri May 23 07:13:08 CDT 2008


Hi Miguel,

Which capture card are you using?

You need to make sure the card is working before trying out AG with it.

Does your card not come with a 'control panel' type program where you can configure the settings, and display each video input to check whether it's working or not?  For example, Winnov Videum card come with a diagnostic program allowing you to check each of the 4 inputs.

I use a Pinnacle DC1000 at home, and it came with a program called 'miroVideo' that can be run on it's own to configure the video inputs, and you can view the camera feeds connected.

It's also worth checking device manager as well. If you look at the attached image (Video-Devices.gif), you'll see that your multi-input capture card should either appear as 4 separate Imaging Devices, or as a Video Controller.

Can you confirm what you see when you try to add a Video Producer. If you see the other attached image (Video-Producer.gif) you'll see my webcam (Logitech Quickcam), the 4 Winnov Videum inputs and also the Microsoft WDM Image Capture. I believe that this addition Microsoft item is the result of the OS installing its own device driver for the webcam. It shouldn't do this for any specialist capture devices, i.e. those made by Pinnacle, Winnov etc...so I wouldn't choose it. You should choose the device applicable to the driver name.

This should all be easy with Windows XP - and if you cannot get it working here, you find it much harder on Linux!

Hope this helps,

Ben.

-----------------------------------------
Ben Green

Access Grid Support Centre
Research Computing Services
University of Manchester
Room G49-H, Kilburn Building
Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL
 
tel: +44 (0)161 306 6621
fax: +44 (0)161 275 0637
email - ben.green at manchester.ac.uk
web - www.agsc.ja.net
-----------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf Of Miguel Sáez
Sent: 23 May 2008 11:46
To: AG-TECH list
Subject: Re: [AG-TECH] Issues with a new AG 3.1 installation.

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/
====================================================

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