How to get the framegrabber card to be recognized and to talk to /dev/video.

You will need to use the bttv (video4linux or video4linux2) module (part of the Linux kernel) to get Linux to recognize the framegrabber card.
The bttv device driver can be downloaded from here: http://www.bytesex.org
Detailed installation information can be found here: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/BTTV.html

Quick start directions are below. You will probably need to be logged in as root to do these things.

  1. Make sure there is a video device defined:
    bash# ls -l /dev/video0
    
    You should get a response like:
    crw-------    1 sklar    root      81,   0 Mar 23  2001 /dev/video0
    
    If not, then do the following:
    bash# mknod /dev/video0 c 81 0
    
    You might also need to do:
    bash# chmod 666 /dev/video0
    
    Finally, you will need to do:
    bash# ln -s /dev/video0 /dev/video
    
  2. Make sure that the bttv module is installed:
    bash# /sbin/lsmod
    
    Then bttv should be included in the list of modules. If not, then you need to build it and insert it. Build it by downloading and compiling the bttv code that you can get from http://www.bytesex.org/bttv.

    Insert the bttv module by doing the following:

    bash-2.05# sync; sleep 1; sync
    bash-2.05# /sbin/insmod videodev
    Using /lib/modules/2.4.19-rc1-1cucs/kernel/drivers/media/video/videodev.o
    bash-2.05# /sbin/modprobe bttv card=10
    
  3. Test your installation using the xawtv program.
    If it isn't already available on your system, you can download it from http://www.bytesex.org/xawtv.
    Note that xawtv doesn't work reliably with video4linux2.

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