Consumer-grade digital video cameras, firewire, Linux, anybody?

[Bob Raymond]

Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

>On Mon, 27 May 2002 20:22:30 +0000
>Bob Raymond <guarneri at mindspring.com> wrote:
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>>That friend of mine with the laptop battery troubles has a nice, fast 
>>SuSE 8.0 with XFS.  I haven't tested battery yet, but the thing isn't 
>>swapping to the HD all the time, even though I went overboard and gave 
>>him 600 mb of swap.  Now, he wants to replace his now dead digital video 
>>camera with something in the $300-$500 range, that works in Linux, and 
>>is firewire, and is of good quality.  I'm giving up Googling.  I spent 
>>about two hours on there and got plenty of links about webcams, but he 
>>doesn't want a webcam.  Any suggestions on what to get?
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>Digital camera or digital video? They are not the same. The latter has tape
>and the former does not. And, just to be nice, they have a different
>protocol... And stick to OHCI cards as driver support is far more active
>than for pcilynx-type cards. This is especially true when using
>isosynchronous mode and DMA.
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>We use UniBrain firewire cards and Sony DFW-SX900 digital cameras with
>Linux. Be warned that that they do not work well with Caldera 3.1 as
>the kernel used had a bad firewire release. The kernel in 3.1.1, however,
>works as expected. (There is a patch for this available from the 1394
>site listed later in this message, but getting the Caldera 3.1 kernel to
>recompile was not obvious as there were mistakes in the Caldera rpms that
>required far too much fiddling to sort out. There is a doc from Caldera
>about how to do this, it you need it.)
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He's using SuSE 8.0, so I don't think that should be a problem.  I'm 
pretty sure SuSE detected the firewire port during installation.  I'll 
have to take a look next time I'm near his laptop.

>If your question is about digital video tape cameras, then I can say
>nothing. Except that the advice about the firewire card and kernel
>release are also relevant.
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All that matters is that the camera is of decent enough quality to 
videotape piano concerts, so I don't care whether it is tape or no tape.

>Have you checked out http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/hcl.php for
>information on supported hardware?
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No, I hadn't.  Thanks for the link.  But it seems most of the stuff on 
that list is way out of his price range.  I'm finding plenty of cameras 
in his range; too bad they aren't on the list.

Thanks,

Bob Raymond

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