Disclaimer

These pages are being written as I try to understand the issues myself, don't take anything here for given and do your own research. If you know something is wrong or missing please correct it. DuncanLithgow

Hardware

Almost all modern digital camcorders have included this connection since 1995. Many computers intended for home or professional audio/video use have built-in FireWire ports including all Macintosh and Sony computers currently produced. You can read more general notes about firewire in the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394

You should note that if you plan on buying an expansion card to support ieee1394 you must be sure that your system bios will understand it.

Software

Once all the hardware is in place you need some software to capture from the firewire port. Kino is available in the repositories and is a highly regarded video editing suite. It will attempt to connect to your firewire port and detect any device there.

As I understand it firewire in Ubuntu is supported by libraw1394 [http://www.linux1394.org/] which is a standard part of the Ubuntu kernel. Unfortunately for us you cannot currently capture using Kino and the ieee1394 device, Kino tries by default to use /dev/raw1394. This gives the error:

On the Ubuntu Developers in [https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-March/016593.html an email] from Scott James Remnant the reason is given as this:

"The problem is that the raw IEEE1394 device is literally just that; raw access to the IEEE1394 stack! This means that anyone with write access to that device can access any device connected to the Firewire port, and because of the nature of Firewire, they may execute arbitrary code on the host system as root!"

As I have not found one single solution tothis I have made the list below, I hope you find something that helps.

1. One way around the read/write permissions is to enable members of the group read and write permission to the raw 1394 device - this is a security risk.

sudo chmod g+rw /dev/raw1394

(This did not work for DuncanLithgow )

1. Someone else on the list suggested using [http://www.linux1394.org/dv1394.php dv1394]. In Kino you can set which driver/module is used under Edit > Preferences. On the pulldown menu choose "dv1394" and set the path in the text box to "/dev/dv1394/0" Note that dv1394 is a directory and contains a file named "0". The file "0" is read-write for group video (This does work for SteveG )

2. Apparently the dv1394 device, and video1394, are set up to allow users in the video

group to read and write to them. Add yourself to the video group. (This didn't work for DuncanLithgow )

Hoary Specific notes

Hoary does not create a device for IEEE1394 when you plug in your camera, read: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2792

(The following steps are adapted from [http://www.bxlug.be/en/articles/220 bxlug.be]) If you are having trouble getting the modules to load (udev should do this when you plug in the camcorder, and does in Breezy), you can load them at startup. To do this you need to edit /etc/modules as root. To do this open a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/module

Then add these two lines at the end:

raw1394 video1394

To save you having to restart you can force start them now with:

modprobe raw1394
modprobe video1394

Try the camera now. If it still doesn't work there are a few more steps to try over at http://www.bxlug.be/en/articles/220 Their approach didn't work for me.

Remember to try running kino as root

sudo kino

See Also

• BootFromFirewireHardDisk

• EthernetOverFirewire

CategoryHardware CategoryDocumentation CategoryCleanup