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Real Time Video Stream over Firewire?

Posted by Cliff on from the high-quality-webcams dept.

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?"

11 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. The only solution. by skinfitz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...dude, buy a Mac. Now. Don't ask, just do it. If you like stuff like this you won't regret it.

    Step 1. Connect firewire cam into Mac.

    Thats it - iMovie will open up and you can watch the video live or record it and start editing.

    If you want to watch TV, at work for media aquisition I've just got an Elgato eyeTV box which will receive TV and work as a PVR. The bit I like most is you get a years subscription to a website that has all the TV schedules, and you can decide what you want the PVR to record. i.e. I can sit here at home, browse a website for a TV program, click one button, and it will be recorded by the PVR at work. The eyeTV software checks into the site every hour and updates it's list of what you want to record. The video is stored as standard MPEG-2, however even though I have the Pro version of Quicktime 6.5 and the MPEG2 component, I can watch the exported movies but I can't export them with sound so be wary of that.

    Yes I know PC's can do similar things, but having worked with digital video for around 8 years now, I have to say that the Mac kicks the arse of everything when it comes to video editing. The reason? Standard hardware and good software. One person's Powerbook 1Ghz is exactly the same as anothers meaning that the software authors have less disparate hardware to worry about.

    1. Re:The only solution. by jhoger · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:The only solution. by clifyt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Monoculture?

      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 :-) 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.

  2. Windows XP has support for this... by samrolken · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    samrolken
  3. Since when is this a big deal? by MatrixBandit · · Score: 3, Informative

    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".

  4. Re:Before iSight... by vranash · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  5. Daaamn.... by Dahan · · Score: 3, Funny
    Worst

    Ask Slashdot

    Ever.

    If you know that you can play prerecorded tapes through the 1394 port, how about flipping the switch on the camera from VTR mode to Camera mode and see what happens?

    1. Re:Daaamn.... by pineapples10 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Next Ask Slashdot: Im sick of paying Microsoft for their OS and/or Apple for their software/hardware. Is there some sort of free replacement operating system available? It would be great to find one with some sort of source code available. I know this is kind of a weird request, but has anyone heard of such a thing?

  6. Slashdot is not the place to ask. by stickb0y · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

  7. Re:Easy by 3waygeek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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).

  8. Many erroneous replies by swg101 · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.

    --
    Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.