Fort Wayne LUG Blogs

Over the summer I spent a couple of weeks stuck in the hopeless pit of despair that is Linux/Palm synchronization. Sure, I know that some of it works most of the time, and a small fraction works all of the time, but a lot of things don’t work much at all. But I’m not going to talk about that.

For some reason, probably that I hadn’t had enough frustration, after the Palm debacle I decided to get a FireWire cable for my video camera and see how bad it would be to capture the video to my Ubuntu desktop. After the cable came, I put off playing with it for weeks, knowing that it would probably involve days of fiddling to get some painful process to yield a partial result. Yes, I’d definitely had my expectations lowered.

So I wasn’t expecting much when I plugged the cable into my video camera (a Canon Optura 20, nothing special) and then into the hitherto unused FireWire port on my machine. Hmmm… dmesg at least revealed that something happened - after a few cryptic and not encouraging messages it reported “ieee1394: raw1394: /dev/raw1394 device initialized.”

Well, that was something although I wasn’t particularly encouraged by the “raw” part. Great, I thought, another few hours of tinkering to get something “not raw” and usable by the system. I’ve been around and I know it just can’t be that simple.

Still, ever the optimist, I can’t resist trying something, so I run dvgrab, a commandline video capture utility. After the usual fooling with permissions so that dvgrab could actually access the camera, something odd happened - it started grabbing video! How weird was that? And it was video I could actually play back! (Remind me to tell you sometime about the time I had MythTV “working” for weeks, except that the video was always played back upside down.)

Unable to believe my good fortune I loaded Kino, probably the most common video editing software for Linux right now. Huh? Not only did it grab video “out of the box”, but it controlled my camera, just like it should. Capture and editing? No problem!
So yeah, I’m still in shock. 20 minutes of fooling around and I have video capture and editing up and running.  It just worked. It may not be the Linux I’m used to, but you know, I could get used to that.