Hi,

I have been installing CCTV systems for years and recently got into the designing and programming of these systems. I need help in finding a VFW (video for windows) driver for a connexant 878A chipset capture card or Geovision card. The reason for this is that any VFW device can easily be interacted with via an OCX. If this is not possible a way to directly communicate with the card is required.

The reason for this is that I need to add information to the captured image in realtime, but the inforation is coming from an application I have already written. I know the Geo software already has a similar function, but this want's the data to be received in the same way as a POS (Point of Sale) printer would receive it, which is not how I can pass the data.

Please help and thanks for looking.

depending on what you developed your app in will depend on what hooks you have available from the api.

If you want to overaly text etc onto an image you will need to do that via your graphic engine of choice before passing to your storage engine. Another way (and id say better) would be to store the data in a db and overlay at playback time. That way you could filter on pos data as you would have that data to query. Overlayed burnt in text does not have that option. If your engine is jpeg based you could consider storing the info as exif data on each frame and it 'could' still be indexed.

Your 878a chip is very generic and there isnt a driver for all cards, you will need to find drivers for the card not the chip as the capture chip is a small part of the board, the pci multiplexer is the hard bit to control on these cards. YOU could look at linux as the bttv driver is available for most 878 and the newer philips chips.

Good luck

James

Not used the geo pos addon yet, but the literature for it does give examples other than POS use, for example

GV POS-DVR solution can help Vehicle Supervision Offices successfully monitor the vehicle inspection process at their authorized inspection agencies. By overlapping live video images and recording archives with the plate numbers, test parameters and inspection results

So it looks like its not just POS format, but there is not much info on their website, maybe if you fire of a email to them to ask what it can support, especially as you wrote the sending application so you have scope to alter the output protocol / data format.