connecting FreeBSD 7 to a DVD-recorder on FW

[Sean Bruno]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 20:42 +0200, Zahemszky Gábor wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I've got some DV files (grabbed from a Pana-camera, with iMovie - from
> iLife - on a Mac). In my laptop I have an PCMCIA based FW-card, so
> I'd like to transfer these files to my DVD-recorder's disk, which has
> DV-IN connector on it. I connected my machine with a DV-cable to my
> recorder, set up the recorder to use the DV connector as a source, and
> tried the "fwcontrol -S myfile.dv" command. fwcontrol printed numbers
> 1234... and so on, and after about a minute, (it was the length of the
> DV-file) it stopped. But the dvd-recorder didn't see any data on the
> DV-IN line.

Can you point me to the model/make of the DVD recorder?  It looks like
you connected your DVD recorder to your FreeBSD machine.  If that is the
case, can you check your system dmesg when you plug in the DVD recorder?

> So after it, I tried fwcontrol -r, fwcontrol -t, tried to ask the
> configuration with -c 0, -c 1, but it wasn't good. So some questions:
> 
> - what does the information mean in an "fwcontrol -t" output? Eg, like

fwcontrol -t is the "topology map" it lists information about
speeds(S400/S800), connections and IDs.  The man page for fwcontrol
explains a lot of this.
> When I plugged the cable on the other connector of my FW-card, the C
> went from port1 to port0:
> 
> crc_len: 4 generation:14 node_count:2 sid_count:2
> id link gap_cnt speed delay cIRM power port0 port1 port2 ini more
> 00    1       5  S100     0    1    0W     -     P         0    0
> 01    1       5  S400     0    1   -1W     C     -         1    0
> 
> And this one is from my other machine, with a  built-in FW-controller,
> with only one connector, and without a cable plugged in it:
> 
> crc_len: 3 generation:2 node_count:1 sid_count:1
> id link gap_cnt speed delay cIRM power port0 port1 port2 ini more
> 00    1       5  S400     0    1   -1W     -     -         1    0
> 
> So what do these pieces of information mean?

This is showing the connection status of the various FW ports and how
things are connected.

> What are node names - I need them to the -c or -d, or to some other
> options? Where can I see them?

The node "name" is the "id" field from fwcontrol -t.  It's a number, like
0, 1 or 2

> How can I know, that my machine sees the DVD-recorder on the link, or
> what can I do, if it doesn't see?

I am worried about the "speed" of the unit that shows up as "S100".
That's the minimum speed, and with modern FW components usually means
that something failed in negotiation.  

I know of one bug (fixed in version > 8.0) that will show up IF an S800
capable device is connected to a S400 device via one of it's S800 ports.
If you can connect both ends to S400 ports, it would work around that
problem.

Sean