McLinux wrote:
Hi all,
Recently I purchased the above mentioned handycam. This stuff is really
cool, however when I need to connect it to my machine, it demands Win*
OS which I am not willing to boot into (USB port is accessible only
through Win*, Mac).
Hence I am purchasing firewire card and cable so that I can access
IEEE1394 port instead of USB. Can you please suggest any card which you
have used and found satisfactory? Are they working good with GNU/Linux?
Lastly but not the least can you recommend any good software that can be
used to get the MiniDV recording from the handycam to the machine? Any
pointers where I can find good details about HandyCam under GNU/Linux?
Did you find anything yet? Here're some comments.
Kino. It seems to be _the_ DV/IEEE1394 capture utility, plus lets you
do some editing. http://kino.schirmacher.de/ The underlying ieee1394
capture tools will list which chipsets they work best with, and possibly
cards by brand. I've only tried it with the Ricoh chipset onboard in a
Sony Vaio, which worked ok, but a little unstable. There are command
line utilities 'dvcont'/'dvgrab' also, which will do control and DV
grabbing from the console.
If you plan on doing editing, Cinelerra seems to be the high end app,
but it's fairly complex unless you want to do serious editing.
MainActor doesn't look bad, but they seem to only offer an eval. of
their recent version, which I'm told renders their logo on all output
video. If you can live with that, it's another option.
http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3
http://www.mainconcept.com/index_flash.shtml (caution, Flash intro page)