bt848x - Introduction

Requirement

PCI video capture card using Bt8x8 chip family: 'Bt8x8' refers chip family of Brooktree or Conexant, such as Bt848, Bt848A, Bt849, Fusion878. Whether chip vendor is Brooktree or Conexant does not matter because Brooktree is now Conexant. There are various cards using Bt8x8, so easy to purchase, I think.
UltraSPARC workstation or PC with PCI bus nexus: Workstation must have (vacant) PCI bus slot. All newer desktop/server models (such as Blade 150, Blade 100, Ultra 10, Ultra 30, Ultra 60... etc) have PCI bus interface.
Video graphics card configured to use 24-bit or more color depth: Viewers need TrueColor screen to display. To confirm this requirement, run xdpyinfo command and check depth of visual for default screen.
[SPARC only] PGX32/PGX64 or FFB2+ are preferable because they have hardware based color space conversion function. But, these video graphics cards are often configured to use 8bit color depth, please beware. Run m64config or ffbconfig command to change color depth of OpenWindows configuration. And you can't use this function in higher resolution mode (such as 1600x1200).
Audio cable with stereo plugs: bt848x doesn't support digital audio interface, you should connect audio-out of video capture card into line-in of sound card if you use tuner.

Solaris 8 or later of SPARC platform edition: bt848x is tested on Solaris8 and Solaris9. It is not sure whether bt848x runs under Solaris7 or before. This package contains 32 bit and 64 bit versions of driver, so no need to care about kernel operation mode.
mediaLib™ (SUNWmlibl): Some of viewers (sdlview and v4lsview) requires mediaLib™. mediaLib™ is a library optimized for multimedia processing. It can be obtained from http://www.sun.com/processors/vis/mlib.html without fee. mediaLib™ 2.1 and 2.2 and 2.2.1 are known to work.
SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer): Some of viewers requires SDL shared library. SDL can be obtained freely from http://www.libsdl.org/. Compiled package is available at http://blastware.org/packages.php/libsdl. SDL-1.2.4 is known to work, but I am not sure that utility program works with SDL-2.x series.
GTK+ (Gimp Toolkit): Bundled utility program requires GTK+ shared library. GTK+ can be obtained freely from http://www.gtk.org/. Compiled package is available at http://blastware.org/packages.php/gtk. GTK+-1.2.10 is known to work, but I am not sure that utility program works with GTK+-2.x series.
root privilege: You must be authorized to use that machine as root. Once installed, any user can read video capture device by default.

If you have interest in building package or developing application by yourself, you will need following software.

C compiler

Sun C Compiler (such as Forte C/C++ or Sun ONE C/C++) or GCC-3.x.

Reported that some version of GCC-3.x can't generate working driver.

mediaLib™ header files

SUNWmlibh contains developer files

sourceforge Account

CVS committer must be sourceforge user.