16-04-2021

DVC 1394 Driver

How to transfer MiniDV Camcorder footage digitally via Firewire 1394 to your Ubuntu 12.04 computer:

Downloads ending for the Sony Raw Driver and some versions of PlayMemories Home, Action Cam Movie Creator, and MVR Studio. Notice of Limited Warranty Updates for Sony Electronics Inc. And Sony of Canada Ltd. End of support notification for products using the Windows XP operating system. It’s hooked up to the computer via a 1394 Firewire cable and it’s hooked up to a VCR/DVD player via a three-banded eighth-inch (3.5mm) A/V plug-to-RCA cable. This method has served me well since 2008. I now find that this method freezes up my computer. I can eliminate certain possibilities.

Dvc 1394 Driver Manual

Dvc 1394 Driver Updater

I have a bunch of old (>10 year) MiniDV tapes laying around that I wanted to transfer to my Smugmug account online. Mainly because I am concerned about losing the content due to decaying magnetic tape and partly because I am organizing the last bit of imagery I have onto the cloud for easy access across all of my devices.

Once upon a time circa Ubuntu 8.04 I was able to plug in the firewire cable into the back of my PC and into my Panasonic MiniDV Camcorder, load Kino, and everything worked. This time, it wasnt so obvious.

The problem:

Kino reports 'WARNING: raw1394 kernel module not loaded or failure to read/write /dev/raw1394!'
The newest Firewire driver does not create the raw1394 device node
Permissions are not setup to allow for general user access on the /dev/fw0 node
Bug Report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dvgrab/+bug/779680

The fix:

1394 Dv Capture Driver Free Download

Create a link to the newer /dev/fw0 node

$ sudo ln /dev/fw0 /dev/raw1394

Run Kino as superuser

$ gksu kino

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Hope this helps someone else out there as it took me a good 3-4 hours of searching the net and trying different drivers to come up with this simple solution.