January 21, 2007

Capturing HDV stream from camera in Linux over FireWire

Things are a bit in disarray in the HDV Linux department. While there are some good Linux applications out there supporting HD video editing (such as Cinelerra), getting HDV stream out of the camera via ieee1394 aka FireWire aka iLink proved to be a formiddable task.

Anyway, after getting hold of HDV-capable Canon HV10 digital video camera, I quickly found that dvgrab utility which was supposed to take care of my grabbing needs, doesn't work with HDV streams (which are in essence just 1440x1080i MPEG2 streams on a standard miniDV tape casette). Some googling later, it appears an utility with rather dull name test-mpeg2 (a part of libiec61883-utils RPM in Fedora Core Linux) should help me to capture the Firewire stream. But it didn't. It printed the hopeful "Starting to receive" message and just sat there doing nothing.

Another round of googling revealed another utility: mpg1394grab which worked despite being tiny (less than 200 lines), 4 years old and written for another video camera altogether. The compiling instructions are in the .c file itself.

Cutting some googling and trying, test-mpeg2 worked in the end, too. I had to provide an id of the ieee1394 node corresponing to my video camera as reported by plugreport:
test-mpeg2 -r 0 > capture.m2t
but before that, run this bit of magic:
plugctl -n 0 oPCR[0].n_p2p_connections=1
What does it do? -n 0 specifies an id of your camera FireWire node from plugreport, and the rest tells adapter to enable the use of Point2Point (p2p) connection for the output (oPCR) instead of a broadcast connection (bcast_connection from plugreport).

Unfortunately, after camera disconnect it has to be set up again. I haven't been able to write an udev rule to make it automatic because apparently udev doesn't catch connect/disconnect events on the FireWire bus (as monitored by udevmonitor).

So there it is, a single 1.5GB file containing 8 minutes of HDV video. Too bad dvgrab with its autosplitting doesn't work with HDV. Though it worked flawlessly in the combination with Kino when the camera was set to output a DV stream, so at least the DV capturing (and editing) looks quite solid in Linux.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am having trouble using firewire to transfer DV video from the HV10 to my PC using Windows XP SP2, and I was curious about using Linux, which I don't have on my PC. (I did not record my videos in HD.) NeroVision 5 (which comes with Nero 8) does not recognize my camera turned on Play and connected by firewire. Windows says it cannot find a driver for my camera. Do you have any advice for me? Thank you!!!!

Anonymous said...

I haven't tried to grab an SD stream from my camera. To capture an HD stream under Windows, I used the excellent HDVsplit. You may try it, maybe it will be able to handle the SD data.