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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?"
A) The guy doesn't have a Mac. He's a PC user. He wants advice on how to do something that's completely possible with a PC. That it can be done on a different platform is, well, totally irrelevant.
B) PC users have perfectly good reasons to preferring the open architecture of the PC over the closed Mac monoculture. No vendor lock-in, ability to repair things yourself, less $$$'s, more friends in same boat, more software, etc.
C) Mac is a whole different universe. I'm a CS grad, and every time I have sat down at a Mac keyboard I have very little luck getting it to do anything I want it to do. PC users happen to be familiar with PCs. Using a Mac has some learning curve after getting used to the Redmondish guis (I include KDE and Gnome in there....)
There's nothing inherently wrong with Macs. It's a nice platform for DTP, multimedia, and general computing. However, these days Mac doesn't have a monopoly on much of any applications, and "Just Buy A Mac" gets more than a little tiresome.
Interesting you should bring up HDTV; I'm in the middle of setting up a HD PVR based on a G3 PowerMac I just bought on eBay.
My digital cable box, the Motorola DCT-6200, puts out a MPEG2-TS stream over its 1394 port. Using the VirtualDVHS package that's part of Apple's Firewire SDK, it should be possible to record HD video; playback will probably require something a little beefier than the 300 MHz G3, but I have more powerful Windows boxen that can handle that.
If you're a Linux guy, check out Linux1394; it should be able to handle both DV and HDTV. AFAIK, there's no working Windows solution for my particular situation just yet (Windows doesn't recognize the Moto box as being anything particularly useful; promised firmware updates from Moto may change that). These guys have been in beta for quite a while now, but no release date has been announced.
HD-capable PVR solutions should become more common in the next few months -- as of April 1, per a recent FCC ruling, US digital cable providers who supply HD services must, at customer request, provide a box that makes the HD signal available through a computer-friendly interface (everyone's taken this to mean 1394, AFAIK).
Monoculture?
:-)
:-) VLC is free for Mac, Windows, Linux and probably a few other OSes that I don't know about...check it out and see if this is a possibility.
And you are comparing this to Wind'rs.
Apple requires you to buy the Case, the Motherboard and the Harddrives. Past that, it is as open as anything else. You can swap out the case with something else (not easily) and hard drives are dead simple.
Past that, one doesn't need 'more software' -- the software that is there works. No need for 100 solutions that don't do shit, when the free one that came with the box is better than 99% of what you find on the PC -- and by that I mean Windows. Want to run Linux / BSD stuff...go to Darwinports. Want to build device drivers -- Darwin in open source and you can get a better picture of how its going to work with the system than with something like Windows.
Yeah, the initial hardware costs...but past that, its nothing closed like Windows.
There are no monopoly on applications for a Mac user, but there is a culture of getting things done right. I wish Windows was this way -- Linux is getting there, unfortunately, for the end user, they get there from the back end.
I'll happily tweak a linux app until I get it right...my mom won't. My dad is clueless about computers and I've had to set up every one that he's bought -- I bought my G4 a few years for music and video and was off for a gig just before my father stopped by unannounced and said he was going to be in town for a few days. My Mac showed up the same day (which was the only reason I went home before heading to the show).
My dad, curious about the Mac, asked about it and I told him to pull it out of the box and hook it up and check it out.
I got back several hours later to find that he had plugged everything in, was on the network (I had wireless for my laptops) and had pulled his video recorder out of his car because he had heard that it hooked into Macs -- and found the one firewire cable that was included and hooked it up to his video camera and it automatically pulled up iMovie...he was learning how to edit concert footage 7 hours after I left him with the machine in unopened boxes and he knew nothing about computers.
When the grandparent of this post says Get A Mac, You Will Be Happier, he means it. Its a bit snappish and its a bit condescending, but those of us that use computers solely to get our work done and not to be computer geeks want to do something, we use our Macs...it allows for computer illiterates to use them knowledgeable within their given field as much as someone that has used computers for years. It also allows geeks that want to get all unixy like me to do that too...
As for not having a monopoly, if they did have a monopoly, maybe you'd see more crappier half done applications on their platform. As its not a monopoly, everything HAS to work right. Again, Linux / BSD is also in this boat -- as they aren't the standard, things have to work right or we will just switch back to the standard, which at this time is Windows.
This is offtopic and will be modded accordingly, but I'm not going to post this anonymously to fear for my precious karma
Having said that, I have gotten Firewire Video to work on the PC, but it was a long sorted process involving buying 2 different FW cards -- one of which seemed to be incompatible with all my devices, and a few different software packages to edit this stuff and stream it.
Having said that, I've heard that that VLC (Video Lan Client) can do Firewire Streaming, but I haven't looked at it in this capacity yet. I have used it as a way to import DVDs that were nearly dead due to friends misuage so that I at least had backups of the crap