Welcome to Pauline's

Hobbies - Video For Linux

Zoran (ZR36120) based framegrabbers

Well, to put some more great software on this page, I hereby proudly present my zoran driver which is based on a ZR36120 and SAA7110 framegrabber chipset. Nowadays it has a VBI interface, allowing you - with the proper software - to look at viditel pages! The driver itself is video4linux compatible. As the versionnumber indicates, its a work in progress, but I have a picture of myself onscreen and even a webcam of our garden!

Thanks to the spontanious gift of Chris Halsall and Michael Uemminghaus of two zoran based framegrabber cards, the development of the zoran driver can continue. Many thanks go out to these two gentleman! The 2.4 version of the driver is 'back on track'.

For the continued correct workings of the driver, I recommend the bigphysarea patch. It's not really needed anymore, but if you get a lot 'out of memory' errors when opening the video device, you know I told you so!

NEW: Since kernel-2.3.34 the zoran driver is included in the standard tarball. The kernel however is most of the time slightly lagging behind the latest and the greatest. For the newest features and/or bugchecks I would suggest getting the latest driver from here.

   Bytes      Timestamp       Filename
________ ____________________ ____________________________
   15460 Aug 12 20:31:15 1998 zoran-0.5.tar.gz
   24097 Aug 17 23:37:23 1998 zoran-0.5.1.tar.gz
   30111 Aug 25 23:15:20 1998 zoran-0.5.2.tar.gz
   30415 Aug 29 23:44:46 1998 zoran-0.5.3.tar.gz
   30570 Jan  6 11:57:00 1999 zoran-0.5.4.tar.gz
   34884 Apr 25 21:32:33 1999 zoran-0.5.5.tar.gz
   35267 May  5 21:26:59 1999 zoran-0.5.6.tar.gz
   35603 Jun 22 22:08:23 1999 zoran-0.5.7.tar.gz
   35913 Jul 24 18:20:57 1999 zoran-0.5.8.tar.gz
   37747 Aug 28 21:17:02 1999 zoran-0.5.9.tar.gz
   37938 Sep 19 01:29:32 1999 zoran-0.6.0.tar.gz
   39318 Nov 25 17:11:15 1999 zoran-0.6.1.tar.gz
   48140 Dec  4 17:51:36 1999 zoran-0.6.2.tar.gz
   49112 Dec 28 11:21:15 1999 zoran-0.6.3.tar.gz  [LATEST]
   62701 Jun 27 11:24:40 2001 zoran-2.4.0.tar.gz

EXTRA: Here is a zoran-2.2.12.diff which can be patched directly in the kernel-2.2.12. I recommend however using the [LATEST] zoran driver.

Broadway

The broadway card is a card capable of emitting direct MPEG-1 or AVI video streams. Of course, it's also capable of DMAing the videostream somewhere in memory, so be prepaired! The card is also capable of recoding a video stream from AVI/MPEG-1 to MPEG-1/AVI.

The driver for it is not done, not even in a long shot. I have trouble understanding the complexity of the NT driver which seems to contain the same driver 6 times, but which one is doing what? And without any docs this is a hard nut to crack... :( the NT sources are available below:

   Bytes      Timestamp       Filename
________ ____________________ ____________________________
 1989140 Jan 31 10:02:00 2000 Release2.53.tar.gz

Bigphysarea

Bigphysarea is a driver which allocates a big piece of memory during boottime and returns the entire piece or parts of it to a requesting driver. The driver is not created by me, but is maintained by me for the newer kernels.

Some hardware requires memory in physical continuous blocks. Howevery, the longer your Linux system is running, the more main memory is getting allocated and freed in different sizes. This leads to the fenomenen called 'memory fragmentation'. And the end result of this all is a machine which has enough memory left, but scattered all over the place, thereby failing our drivers with an 'out of memory'. Prime examples of these hardware are soundcards which need to be initialized and the above mentioned framegrabber.

   Bytes      Timestamp       Filename
________ ____________________ ____________________________
    7136 Aug 21 14:06:29 1998 bigphysarea-2.1.116.tar.gz
    7165 Feb 17 11:18:40 1999 bigphysarea-2.2.1.tar.gz
    7198 May 20 22:56:11 1999 bigphysarea-2.2.9.tar.gz
    7173 Oct 23 10:22:54 1999 bigphysarea-2.2.12.tar.gz
    6676 Dec 28 11:29:02 1999 bigphysarea-2.3.34.tar.gz
    6787 Jan 24 15:10:10 2000 bigphysarea-2.3.40.tar.gz
    7158 Oct 20 09:11:15 2000 bigphysarea-2.2.13.tar.gz
    7477 Oct 20 09:11:59 2000 bigphysarea-2.4.0-test12.tar.gz
    7413 Jan 21 02:33:02 2001 bigphysarea-2.4.0.tar.gz
    7466 May  8 23:11:11 2001 bigphysarea-2.4.4.tar.gz
    7542 Feb 23 11:49:37 2003 bigphysarea-2.4.20.tar.gz  [LATEST]

When there is no patch for the exact kernel version you are running, try the patch with the lower number. Changes are it will work without problems. If you run into problems however, please inform me so I can correct the patch.