Iomega Buzz and Linux

This is a really old capture card and unit I had lying about in a box that I decided to hook up after having loads of problems with my EasyCap USB capture device. Once this worked but now, whatever I do it will not.

Anyway I thought why not throw the card in the PC and see what happens ? If nothing else I will have a SCSI card that may come in useful one day (the Card has one built in).

Well it wasn't as easy to get results as I was hoping until today when I decided to go back to it and try again.
The latest Mint Olivia has drivers for this models chip built into the Kernel but I have never up to yet got it to display video, until now. I found a post on the Ubuntu forums referencing people having problems with the aforementioned EasyCap device. Someone had posted a solution for getting video out of it. Well it didn't work for MY easyCap when I tried it but I thought as it's plugged in why not check the fix out using the Buzz ?

It worked !

So, this solution.....

Apparently the EasyCap assumed (my simple understanding) that input from the transmitting device, whether it be a Camcorder, VCR, camera, Satellite receiver, whatever was transmitting S-Video format, so if you are using the composite input to the EasyCap you would get no Video unless you were sending an S_video signal using the S-Video input.
I have no S-Video leads for anything so had never checked if anything worked this way. All my old stuff has composite or SCART outputs which I use a SCART to Composite converter plug on.

(Composite is the Yellow Phono plug usually next to the Red and White Audio out plugs on old stuff)

I digress, I connected up everything as I would normally for a test on a little camera I have that sends a live composite signal. I fired up "Cheese" my webcam application, checked its properties and set it to /dev/Video1 which is my little webcam and got a nice reflection of myself waving to myself on screen. So it works for that. I then changed to /dev/Video0 which is the Iomega buzz...Blank screen.
I then closed down Cheese and opened terminal, entering the fix from the forum.

Terminal

sudo apt-get install v4l-utils

This installed the v41 utilities for the Linux Video driver V4l. Then on installation

Terminal
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -i 0

This is a direct command to tell the system whether the input is composite on /dev/Video0

Opening "Cheese" again I selected /dev/Video0 once more in preferences and found a video feed that could be watched or recorded. I now need to check out my old VCR tapes and see if it records the sound also, but that's another day.

I don't yet know if this will be permanent on a reboot or if I will have to make a configuration file for this. I will know tomorrow.

The info along with how to set things up with VLC Player can be found (after a long scroll to the end of the thread) at:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-924504.html

Thanks Guys !!