Which USB video grabber to buy for Orange Pi?

[Andralin]

I have an Orange Pi PC Plus and I'm looking for a USB video grabber. 

Could you suggest me some models which are easy to setup and work with OPi reliably?

[Andralin]

OK, after some research I managed to find and configure a USB video grabber for my OrangePi PC Plus.

 

I'm building a audio center for my car using OrangePi. And I decided to install a cheap reversing camera from ebay in my car, which supplies composite analog video output.

I want to display the reversing cam stream on also on my OPi audio center display, so I needed an analog video grabber.

 

I have ordered exactly this one from ebay:

EasyCap DC60 USB Video Capture Card Adapter with ChipSet UTV 007 for Win 7 8 10

 

It's very important to let it have UTV 007 chipset surely,  attention, there are many copies with different chipsets. What I read other chipsets won't work.

I installed the driver from this link:

usbtv

 

After driver installation, you should see something like this:

# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 1b71:3002 Fushicai USBTV007 Video Grabber [EasyCAP]

And check if the device could be used as a capture device:

# v4l2-ctl --all

Driver Info (not using libv4l2):
        Driver name   : usbtv
        Card type     : usbtv
        Bus info      : usb-sunxi-ehci-1.6
        Driver version: 3.4.113
        Capabilities  : 0x05000001
                Video Capture
                Read/Write
                Streaming
Priority: 2
Video input : 0 (Composite: ok)
Video Standard = 0x0000f900
        PAL-M/60
        NTSC-M/M-JP/443/M-KR
Format Video Capture:
        Width/Height      : 720/480
        Pixel Format      : 'YUYV'
        Field             : Interlaced
        Bytes per Line    : 1440
        Size Image        : 691200
        Colorspace        : SMPTE 170M
        Transfer Function : Default
        YCbCr Encoding    : Default
        Quantization      : Default

 

This seems very good.

After that using mplayer I can see the captured video stream perfectly on my HDMI display with 800x480 resolution. 

You need to supply the proper options for mplayer. I wanted to see the stream on the framebuffer, since I don't use X window. This command works for me:

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:norm=PAL-M:width=720:height=480:outfmt=yuy2:device=/dev/video0:input=0 -vf flip -vf expand=800:480:40:0 -vo fbdev:/dev/fb0

Change the video filter -vf options (flip, expand) according to your display resolution and needs (if needed at all).

The stream is playing perfectly, without any single frame dropped.

 

There is one important thing. Always connect the USB grabber to the OrangePi using a USB hub! The device is taking 330 mA which is too much for the OPi, without USB hub the OPi USB supply voltage drops down to 4.3 V. 

I'm planning to order and try this cable also: Delock Cable USB 3.0 type A male + USB type A male > USB 3.0 type A female, I hope with this one I can just supply an external 5V DC power to the dongle, without using a hub.

 

[Rodrigo Silveira]

Does this work on Linux Os or Android?

[Igor]

This entire community is (Armbian) Linux oriented. It could also work in Android.