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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?"
...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.
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
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
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?
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).