Diamond DVC1000's

The Diamond DVC1000 is an extremely cheap PCI video capture/grabber/overlay device. It's based around the extremely cool BookTree/Rockwell Bt848 video decoder/scaler/etc chip. The chip allows for three composite inputs or one SVideo and two composites. This board is wired for one SVideo and one composite (the third input is disabled). All inputs are NTSC, but this boards also has both crystals, so PAL input would theoretically work (I haven't tried). I think it would be possible to use the SVideo port as a composite port by driving the composite signal through the luma pin on the SVideo port (pin 3 below), and shorting the chromo pin to ground (I haven't tried this and I wouldn't recommend it unless you really need two inputs).

I haven't done any audio on this board yet, so I don't exactly know how it all works. I'm fairly sure that the unknown pin on the camera port is for some sort of audio input. (I believe this because I've read the specs on a camera similar to the one that plugs into here, and it's got a microphone in it, and there's no other place to bring audio in.)

I may pull this board out of my machine again and start sorting through the audio system. This boards got about three internal audio connectors, along with the external audio out, and the suspected audio in on the camera port. Audio is really not as important to me as the video, so this is not high on my priorities. I'm guessing you run the audio from the VCR via the camera port, then run a patch cable from the audio-out to a line-in or mic connector on your sound card. If I find enough jumper cables and patches, I may try this before pulling the card.

Below are the pinouts for the two SVideo-style ports on the back of the card. From these, you should be able to make cables (or find suitable cables -- I'm sure they're avaiable somewhere) to connect your composite VCRs to this card.

I haven't taken the time to boot up Win95 yet, but I have this card working under Linux.

If you got your DVC1000 from EBay, it most likely came from Emerald City Sales. They sent me a CDR disc with mine full of a bunch of apps for Win95, but they don't seem to be for this card, but may work anyway. They also sent a URL to a point on ahhz.com where you can download the win95 drivers. I haven't tried any of these yet, so YAYOR.

I'm using this card with the video4linux drivers that come with kernels 2.1.76 and up (I've been using 2.1.105). But, the drivers in 2.1.105 are slightly broken. To get capture to work right, you should use Ralf's latest bttv kit. Even though you can compile all the required drivers directly into the kernel, I wouldn't recommend it, at least until you have a working configuration. I had to use the bttv driver as a module so that I could manually pass the video base address. This was because the bttv driver didn't recognize my Image 128s2 card (although the s1 card is recognized). This was as simple as adding an extry in bttv.c for that card after I looked up the constants in pci.h. Extremely simple as modules, extremely slow and time-wasting if you compile them into the monolith.

If your VGA card is not recognized by the driver (ie, you get errors in your syslog about "Unknown base address"), you'll need to do what I describe above -- add your card to the list in bttv.c, or, if you like the manual way of doing it, use the vidmem= argument to the bttv module using the first memory value listed in /proc/pci for your video card. If the first line for the card says something like: "Prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xfd400000.", then load bttv.o like "modprobe bttv vidmem=0xfd" Notice only the first 3 digits are used. This fixed my problems with the card. Symptoms of this problem include the errors in syslog as well as xawtv starting, but having a black window. If the window's just blue, then you don't have this problem. In that case, make sure you have all your video connectors on tight and you've selected the correct input (the camera port is called Composite1 in xawtv). If the picture's in monochrome ("blank and white"), then make sure your video translation type is set correctly (NTSC for US and Japan, PAL for everyone else who doesn't use NTSC or SECAM).

Let me know if you have any comments or other problems that I haven't mentioned. My email address is below.