FreeBSD DV howto?

[Brent Casavant]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, M. Warner Losh wrote:

> I'm wondering if anybody has a FreeBSD DV how-to.  I have a DV
> camera and a AMD64 FreeBSD laptop.  I'd like to harvest the pictures
> from it to (a) archive it in DV25 mode

Just this past weekend I finished capturing about 6.5 hours of DV
footage from my camera.  I just copied the raw DV streams using:

	fwcontrol -R myfile.dv

Bear in mind that this file won't have an AVI wrapper around it or
any other extra bits.  It's just the raw footage.  I've found that
Kino and iMovie understand these files with no problems.

>  and (b) process it to create a DVD.

I generally use Kino to create a set of cuts and save the list into Kino's
".smil" file.  A homegrown Perl script then uses 'dd' to extract the
clips into individual files.  It's still a little clunky, but it gets
the job done for my purposes.

In my case I just want to get the footage out to DVD, without much in
the way of intermediate editting, so effects/fading/etc are something
I haven't experimented with.  This might change as I may need to
write a custom plugin for Kino to do some constrast enhancement on
some of my new footage, but that's probably beyond what you need to
accomplish.

Until recently I hadn't found anything to take that last step to author
a DVD on FreeBSD (I had to use a Mac).  Then I ran across dvdstyler
(in ports), which does the job fairly handily.  Now, creating good-looking
menus and chapters requires more artistic skill than I myself am blessed
with, but from a basic functional perspective it worked quite well.  Well
at least on the one small (~20 minutes of footage) project I used it
for -- those 6.5 hours of footage I've just captured are going to be my
personal torture test.

> It would also be nice 'play' the video on my HDTV that supports
> 1080p.  I know that DV is 640x480, but that's better than normal NTS,
> right?

Actually, I believe NTSC DV is 720x480.  Anyway, assuming you can
author an NTSC DVD using dvdstyler or something of that nature, it
should work the same way as a purchased video DVD on your TV system.

> And kino, which gives me a bus
> error.  Anything else?

As mentioned 'fwcontrol' (part of the base system).  Kino has some
Linux-isms built into it, one of which is the expectation to use
the Linux raw1394 interface for DV capture, which doesn't (to my
knowledge) exist on FreeBSD.  Instead use fwcontrol to capture the
DV stream, and Kino to process the resulting file.

Brent