Yep, another new toy, this one a mini-DV camcorder. The first thing I discovered is that firewire cards are no longer sold on every street corner. A little looking around the web showed dire warnings about most of the bogobrand ones for sale, so I spent a bit more and got one at Staples.
I plugged it in to the Linux box, and Kudzu found it immediately, so I fired up Kino and tried to capture some video. No Joy. To summarize a long frustrating story, Kudzu indeed created the device /dev/raw1394, but hadn’t actually inserted the driver. I insmod’ed it and that step was under control.
Uh, look, Linux guru dudes. I’ve been doing computers for 30 years. It would never ever occur to me that an autoconfiguration program would recognize a new card, tell me it found the card, insert the hardware lever driver, and then create two higher level ‘virtual devices’ based on that new card without inserting the drivers for those virtual devices as well. Lame folks, lame.
Well, now that I’m capturing video, lets try to get the whole tape. Nope, no joy. Kino claims it will control your camcorder and actually chunk the file every so often you have manageable pieces to work with. Nope, as of version 7, Kino will capture the output when you hit ‘play’ on the camcoder, and will crash capture (watch carefully, the monitor will keep playing) when you have a manageable file size stored.
Only Roscoe, and just maybe the developer, know what Cinelerra will do. And unless you’re an experienced video editor already you won’t find out from the docs.
The real pita here is that my linux box has twice the clock speed and twice the memory of our fasted windows box. It’s not the $100 for the windows software, it’s the tired old box I’d have to run it on. So I’m going to make on more attempt to find a linux program that works and has docs, then it’s off to PC Connection for Pinnacle 8.