Grabbing footage from a DV camcorder

[Larry Grover]

Jon Dixon wrote:
> Has anyone tried this under Ubuntu?
> 
> I would like to do this without reverting to my XP desktop with Adobe 
> stuff if possible.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jon
> 


I've captured video from analog tape via an analog-DV converter 
(Canopus ADVC-100), which should be the same as capturing from a DV 
camcorder.

I used my iBook, which has a built in firewire port, and the kino 
program (under Ubuntu Warty and now Hoary).

What kind of problems are you having?

The only problem I ran into was that the /dev/raw1394 device was not 
created automatically.  You can create this device manually:

sudo mknod /dev/raw1394 c 171 0
sudo chown root:video /dev/raw1394
sudo chmod 666 /dev/raw1394

...but it won't survive a reboot.

To save having to retype these lines everytime I wanted to grab video, 
I added a few lines to /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh:

if [ ! -e /dev/raw1394 ]
then
         mknod /dev/raw1394 c 171 0
         chown root:video /dev/raw1394
         chmod 666 /dev/raw1394
fi

There's probably a better way of handling this than modifying the 
system init scripts, but it was simple and it works for me.

I hope this was helpful,
Larry