I have a Zoran based capture card that does mjpeg that I use for coverting old vhs tapes… trying to move to linux but I’m a newbie. Can’t see to get linux to recognize the card and use it to capture into something like VLC or kdenlive.
lspci | grep Zoran
06:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Zoran Corporation ZR36057PQC Video cutting chipset (rev 01)
sudo dmidecode -t 2
dmidecode 3.2
Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 2.4 present.
Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: GA-MA790FXT-UD5P
Version:
Serial Number:
I did… I also tried VLC, Kdenlive and Qt v4l test tool. On another forum they said the driver was deprecated and removed from the kernel since lubuntu 18.04… but the docs didn’t seem to be updated. So I guess I’ll have to try that and see if it works. I guess I’ll need to multiboot with one entry for 18.04?
What about PCI-passthrough into a dedicated VM running on your host? Don’t get me wrong - that may be a terrible idea on my part, as virtual machines often have higher overhead. But if that was crazy enough to work, that would be pretty awesome because you could snapshot and easily back up that VM so that way you’d have something repeatable and predictable.
Another thing you can maybe try, grab a blank USB flash drive. Boot from the Lubuntu 18.04 installation media. Go to install it. But choose the blank flash drive as a hard drive, often it will install onto the flash drive as if it were a real hard drive. Just make sure you don’t let it touch your actual hard drive. If all goes well, you’ll be able to boot to the flash drive with Lubuntu 18.04 when you need to use it, and it will be fully writable and work just like an installation on an internal disk.
on those line of your last suggestion… when booting from an liveUSB… does it load drivers for all hardware? that way I can see if that version works with the hardware even before installing?
Lost a couple afternoons already so trying to see if there is a more efficient way to find a solution.
The majority of drivers are included in the kernel, and are automatically used as needed. There are a few devices out there that need a driver to be manually added (such as the nvidia driver) but most of them are automatically loaded. A Live USB won’t save stateful data typically, so that becomes difficult when trying to enable drivers not in the kernel. But if you install Linux directly onto the USB flash drive treating it as if it were a hard disk, then it will retain stateful data (including any drivers you install). The penalty with USB though is that it typically results in slower performance, but if it’s USB3 and the flash drive is of reasonable quality, you should be fine.