Alphatek - Steven’s Tech Blog

Today I was playing with a Hauppauge ImpactVCB (model 558) video capture card, it’s a very standard Conexant 878A-based card that’s using the bttv driver. As soon as you plug it in your Fedora box, it can be accessed via /dev/video0 by numerous applications including Tvtime and VLC. As you can see on the picture below, it has 3 yellow RCA connectors.

I ran into a big problem: I can use the first (channel 1) and second (channel 4) RCA input, but the third doesn’t seem to be recognized...I tried every channel number from 0 to 8 and nada, that’s probably a driver problem but sadly I have no clue how to resolve this (the card seems to be detected just fine by looking at the dmesg output).

Tomorrow, I’m going to get the 188 model with 4 Composite inputs...I hope this one will work better. Anyway, I’m also looking at the Linux Video LMLBT44 card with 4 Conexant 878 chips, does anybody have a good experience with any other 4 channels capture cards on Fedora?

More news tomorrow...

The long awaited Pidgin 2.5 came out two days ago, and one of the features I’m very happy with are the changes to the MSN protocol: offline messages are now supported.

This was one of the biggest problem for an European user, as MSN is the main IM protocol here, with around 90% market share. People in the industry tend to be connected in offline mode, and you couldn’t receive their IMs until now, they popped up all at once when you used the Microsoft Live client every month or so, not that great

You can see the complete changelog here.