Real Time Video Stream over Firewire?

videomotion asks: "Digital camcorders from Sony and others are very handy gadgets. It is easy to capture or download on to the PC what you have previously recorded on the camcorder's digital tape. It would be wonderful if the same Firewire interface could be used to stream real time video to your PC for cool machine vision applications or for direct capturing of video onto the hard drive. Is it possible get the real time video stream from the Sony digital camcorder (DCR-PC100) through the Firewire cable and display the video picture on your computer screen?"

Comments

Windows XP has support for this...

[samrolken]

In Windows XP, you can just plug in about any camera, including firewire ones, and open the camera's entry in My Computer, and that's what you get. You can then take that and run it through Windows Media Encoder, or about anything else that can handle the standard Windows video capture APIs. I do it all the time.

Since when is this a big deal?

[MatrixBandit]

I don't understand how this became a story. I do this all the time (and without a mac). I'm running Win2K but thats really irrelevant, and I'm using an old Cannon ZR10 DV camera, and I just hook up the firewire, set the camera in record mode (not playback) and set whatever sofware I'm using to capture (usually either Adobe Premiere or just Media Player Classic with its open device functionality) and boom! live video.

I actually used this method to record some really neat feedback video with some very interesting natural effects just by throttling the exposure control on the camera.

Also, using media player classic to record you have full control over what compression method, the end resolution, the end FPS, so you can setup your own surveilance system very easily if you wanted to and still not use that much hd space. (especially if you recorded at like 5 fps and later reviewed it at 60 fps it would be fairly painless (since it's easy to see someone walking around in your house, even at almost 10x the speed) Note: I also do this very thing with my webcam using media player classic.

sortof off topic but if you haven't tried media player classic, I recommend doing a google on it. it plays flash and dvd's too, as well as having the ability to "open a device".

Re:Before iSight...

[vranash]

On this same note, plug it into your linuxbox, and run either avplay, or avgrab (to save to disk) and you can watch or record your stream in realtime, complete with audio :) Hell, if you absolutely must have a GUI, Kino is looking pretty nice for minimalist stuff, and cinelerra is pretty impressive too if you can deal with it's rough edges. Seriously, having just gotten my Mini-DV Canon yesterday, I can tell you DV firewire cameras have to be the easiest devices to set up in linux, windows, and mac with the exception of maybe USB keyboards (seeing as X isn't very user-friendly to plug'n'play input devices) -- vranash

Slashdot is not the place to ask.

[stickb0y]

First, I'm going to have to agree with a lot of the other posters and say that this is a poor question for Ask Slashdot; it shouldn't have been hard to research on your own.

Second, Slashdot is not the best place to ask. The quality of your responses would be much better from forums that focus on video capture, such as Ars Technica's Audio/Visual forum and doom9.org's DV forum.

Now, back to your question:

With most DV camcorders, you should be able to feed a composite or s-video source into the camcorder, and then you can use whatever DV software you normally use. I've heard that there are a handful of DV camcorder models that require you to record to tape first, but I don't think they're Sony's. Unfortunately, there will be significant latency.

As for some of the other Slashdot responses so far: No, you don't need a Mac, and no, you don't need Premiere. If you're using Windows and want a lightweight DV capturing app, try Scenalyzer Live! (~$40) or WinDV (free).

Heck, on Windows, a DV camcorder should show up as a DirectShow capture device. If you don't care about recompressing the video stream (e.g. for machine vision), then you can use any DirectShow-based TV/capture app. There are a number of open-source ones out there (e.g. Virtual VCR).

Many erroneous replies

[swg101]

The software exists in Windows, Mac, and Linux, the issue is that the camera has to support it. Some cameras send nothing over the firewire port unless it is in playback mode. It doesn't matter if you are using a Mac if the hardware will not send data. I have found very little information easily accessible about which cameras will support this. Some manufacturers will answer your questions.

For machine vision (which is why I have looked at this before), check out the firewire cameras at Point Grey Research. They have some really nice stuff and a great support staff.