Digital video camera + IEEE-1394 + Firewire: How?

Svein Halvor Halvorsen svein-freebsd-questions at theloosingend.net
Fri Dec 10 08:03:04 PST 2004


* Rob [2004-12-09 22:21 +0900]
>  What do I need for transferring the movies from the video camera
>  to my PC? Do I need software? Is that in the ports?


The camera will almost certainly send raw dv-data iver the ieee1394 (aka 
firewire, ilink, etc) cable when set on "Play". You can then use fwcontrol 
which is in the base system, to save the stream to disk. Now you have a 
raw dv-file.

This file can be transcoded using dv2jpg, transcode, or some other 
program. You'll find something in ports. You can also use dd to extract 
frames and subsections of the movie. 

You can use dvbackup to camouflage ramdom binary data as dv-data and then 
use fwcontrol to send it to tape. This way you can use your dv-camera as a 
cheap way of making backups (12-14 GB pr. tape).


man fwcontrol(8)



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