First of all thanks to Dan Ritter that replied to my original post but yet I can't find his reply in the debian-user list.
On Mon, Jun 03, 2024 at 10:32:27PM -0400, A. F. Cano wrote: > > I'm trying to get these Lorex SR AIS color cameras, that are supposedly > capable of 1024 x 768 max and 728 x 488 NTSC, to work with a bluecherry > TW-220-8 board, identified by lshw as: > > Intersil Techwell TW6816 multimedia video controller Rev 10. > > The driver (tw68): > > The first suspicious thing is that the board is apparently not detected by the > kernel, or not identified as matching what the tw68 driver supports. Before a > manual > > modprobe -v tw68 > ... I had multiple issues that are now resolved. First, the tw68 driver had to be loaded manually, then the video capture board had 2 identical vga-style sockets, but only one is for video. Then, out of the 16 BNC plugs, only the 4 blue and 4 green are for video. the 8 red are for audio, which is not supported by the driver. The lorex SR AIS color cameras, model MC 7572 also have a feature that really threw me off. I was getting B/W pictures and it was driving me crazy. Only after careful reading of the manual, I learned that in low light, these cameras switch to B/W, so it was normal, when in bright light: good color pictures. The next problem was that by default the driver or the board appear to start in PAL mode, giving garbage outout. I had to install v4l-utils and run $ v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video[0-7] -s ntsc After that, $ ffplay /dev/videoX worked. To handle the automatic loading of the driver, I had to create the file /etc/modules-load.d/bluecherry-tw-220.conf with tw68 in it. Now that I'm getting good pictures, the next step is to set up zoneminder or motion. In case someone else is still using ancient analog video stuff...
