how to grab dv video from a camera to a lucid machine?

[Mark Syms]

> Message: 6
> Date: Mon, 24 May 2010 23:47:58 -0400
> From: "H.S." <hs.samix at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: how to grab dv video from a camera to a lucid machine?
> Excellent! I see no reason why I should not be able to get to work
> similarly.
> 
> The only thing that bugs me is the use of sudo to do this. I recall that
> I was able to do this as a normal user while belonging to the "video"
> group. However, as I mentioned earlier, something changed in the kernel
> in the last year or two and I can no longer do so. I have had to use
> sudo since. Apparenly, the relevant devices (/dev/raw, /dev/ieee1394,
> etc.) are belong to root:root now. Perhaps there is a newer method to
> capture video without resorting to sudo?

You should be able to configure this with appropriate settings in the udev
rules. It's been locked down as you need to be really sure about opening up
the permissions. Firewire is different to USB as when a Firewire device is
plugged into the machine it has full access to all the memory in the host
PC. This has understandably raised some security concerns around malicious
devices that could be plugged into unattended machines and grab a copy of
the memory that could then be analysed to look for passwords and other
sensitive information. As this is a personal laptop, you are probably less
concerned about this.

So something like

addgroup firewire
adduser <your user> firewire

log out & log back in to get your new group membership.

and then configure permissions for /dev/raw & /dev/ieee1394 (and any
others required) to be root:firewire. This could be done by adding a file
to /etc/udev/rules.d/

Again, I haven't tried this so you may need some experimentation to get it
right.

HTH,

Mark.