Hello,
I've been working with linux (RH 7.3) since last August. I've developed a coastal defense system which includes a video camera and and thermal camera. The system was shipped and working fine. I used xawtv to display the video images from the two cameras. Now our PC supplier has discontinued the PC that we were using and we now are using their newest PCs. Unfortunately, we now have that famous black band surrounding our picture! In chasing this problem I've hit all the sites and tried all the old suggestions with no success. I've run xawtv -hwscan on a working PC with the following results:

This is xawtv-3.73, running on Linux/i686 (2.4.18-24.7.x)
looking for available devices
port 67-67 [ -xvport 67 ]
type : Xvideo, video overlay
name : video4linux

port 68-68
type : Xvideo, image scaler
name : I810 Video Overlay

/dev/video0: OK [ -device /dev/video0 ]
type : v4l
name : BT878(Hauppauge (bt878))
flags: overlay capture tuner

On a PC that displays the black border I do not have the info for ports 67 or 68. The only thing that shows up is /dev/video0: OK

Can anyone please explain the output of port 67 and 68? I feel this is a clue to our problem.

Thanks,

Bill

i wasn't aware of any black bands that were remotely infamous.... what do you mean? do you have a screenshot?

Chris,

Thanks for your response. On a flat panel display that measures 13 inches wide X 10 3/4 inches high, the video displayed is 10 1/2 inches wide X 8 inches high. The rest of the display is black! On the previous PC the entire screen is filled with video (no black border). In reading all the postings from all the other sites and this site, there seems to be many people experiencing the same problem.

Yesterday, I took this one step further. I replaced the hard drive in the system in question with a harddrive that had (yuk) Windows 2000 loaded. I ran the Hauppauge card and had full screen display! Went back to linux and had a display with the measurements I've previously given you. This proves to me that the display chipset will work with the Hauppauge card. The problem is therefore in my setup in linux, or the linux driver just won't display fullscreen video with this chipset.

Bill

what resolution are you running the screen at? in order for xawtv to actually run in a proper full screen mode on *any* resolution you will need to check you have the v4l module loaded in /etc/X11/XF86Config, otherwise it can't go beyond 800x600 i.e. the actual size of the video being produced by the card. There should be a module section which you can add it to. other tv apps such as mplayer can always go full screen as they can go through higher level extenstions like xv.

Chris,

The .xawtv file has the line:

fullscreen = 800x600

in it. And the XF86Config-4 file contains the following:

Section "Module"
Load "dbe" # Double-buffering
Load "GLcore" # OpenGL support
Load "dri" # Direct rendering infrastructure
Load "glx" # OpenGL X protocol interface
Load "extmod" # Misc. required extensions
Load "v4l" # Video4Linux
# Load "record" # X event recorder
# You only need the following two modules if you do not use xfs.
# Load "freetype" # TrueType font handler
# Load "type1" # Adobe Type 1 font handler
EndSection

I have tried running xawtv with various -geometry settings but on the new machine always get the same result, an 800x600 screen.

Bill