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Slack on Sony laptop, video capture help

Hi guys,

I have a Sony laptop with Core 2 Duo ... I've never installed linux on a laptop, and in this case, the processor being dual core, is there anything special I need to do to install Slack on it? And when I compile a new 2.6 kernel, do I change the SMP option, or any other options???

More importantly, AFTER I get linux working on it, Im very interested in doing some video capture ... This system came with a nVidia 7600 graphics card ... It has a S-Video port ... AFAIK, S-video is bi-directional, so the same port can be used for input as well as output ... Now, if I hook up an external video source, say my handycam, I want real-time playback of the video on my screen, and Id love it if it were full-screen, instead of windowed ... Any thoughts on this at all?

Google, sure, throws up LOADS of links, problem is I dont know where to begin ... First of all, how do I address the S-Video port? Do I install the nVidia driver with any special params? How do I even know the S-V is part of the nVidia chipset, and not some other controller? Once installed, the hunt for the software begins ... In the middle of all this, I am wondering if there isn't some simple option to just use the console and directly 'pipe' the video input from the external source, straight to the display, using existing commands ...

Thanks for your help,
Karthik

The S-Video port is an output that you could use to hook up to a television monitor with an S-Video input.

Here is a section of my kernel.

Code:

#

# Processor type and features

#

CONFIG_X86_PC=y

# CONFIG_X86_VSMP is not set

# CONFIG_MK8 is not set

# CONFIG_MPSC is not set

CONFIG_GENERIC_CPU=y

# CONFIG_X86_64_XEN is not set

CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_BYTES=128

CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_SHIFT=7

CONFIG_X86_INTERNODE_CACHE_BYTES=128

CONFIG_X86_TSC=y

CONFIG_X86_GOOD_APIC=y

CONFIG_MICROCODE=m

CONFIG_X86_MSR=m

CONFIG_X86_CPUID=m

CONFIG_X86_HT=y

CONFIG_X86_IO_APIC=y

CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC=y

CONFIG_MTRR=y

CONFIG_SMP=y

CONFIG_SCHED_SMT=y

CONFIG_SCHED_MC=y

It is the standard x86_64 kernel for an X86_64 processor (SuSE 10.2 2.6.18.2-34-default kernel).
Both my dual core desktop and my Single core laptop have these settings. The SMP option is set on both.

Thanks for the reply ... I KNOW S-Video is the TV Output, but I was under the impression that S-Video was bi-directional, meaning the same port can be used for both input as well as output ...

Anyway, even if S-Video is out, I have a USB Video Capture device, some cheap thing called CameraMate ... Im sure it uses a pretty common chipset, so I should be able to get that working ... Once I have that working, same question remains, is there any way to 'stream' the external video to the console using just commands, or if not, any package that will let me view external video in real time?

The SMP option is ALWAYS enabled in the kernel, for whatever reasons ... My old AMD Athlon, I compiled kernels leaving the option as it was ... If you do menuconfig, you will see that the SMP option is set to 8, was set to 8, its been awhile since I used Linux now ... What I wanted to know was whether I need to change that to 2 ... and also if there are any SPECIFIC options for the Core2Duo ...

I checked, it uses the Zoran chipset, which is apparently fully supported by all 2.6 kernels, so that is not a problem ... Googling video4linux now, to try to learn how to use these devices ... any useful links would be appreciated...