Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Desktop Audio and Video => Topic started by: trekiej on September 08, 2014, 03:37:34 PM
-
Has anyone here used a firewire camera with an amiga/aros/morphos?
-
Has anyone here used a firewire camera with an amiga/aros/morphos?
was there ever made firewire connectivity for the amiga?
-
I do not know. I guess one needed the mediator board.
-
was there ever made firewire connectivity for the amiga?
Not for the Amiga per se, but the DraCo (Amiga compatible) had a working firewire module.
-
Not for the Amiga per se, but the DraCo (Amiga compatible) had a working firewire module.
Start a bounty to back-port it? ;)
-
Is there an application that would allow some one to switch between two or more firewire
cameras using one computer?
-
I have seen one site that says one needs two pci firewire cards and two cameras to record two streams.
-
Is there an application that would allow some one to switch between two or more firewire
cameras using one computer?
Not for the Amiga. I'm sure an Avid/Premiere/Final Cut-equipped Mac or PC could do it.
The only "Amiga" Firewire interface was for the Draco and worked only with Movieshop. See here (http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=300).
There's no Amiga camera driver for any of the PCI Firewire boards, either. I think the most that's been done for PCI Firewire so far is a beta driver for Firewire hard drives.
-
How about aros and morphos?
-
I think my post above applies to all Amiga flavors. Maybe, maybe things are better on AROS but I don't know for certain.
-
Thanks.
-
Helios wip for MorphOS has support for firewire cameras
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=54713
-
A further wrinkle is that various camera manufacturers offered differing levels of compatibility even with Mac and PC during the height of the format. Canon and Sony and JVC cameras could get finicky, depending on the editing software you were using. As standards go it was often quite frustrating how loosey-goosey they were, speaking dialects of ieee1394 but not quite the same language.
Not much has changed, really, with these same manufacturers and modern cameras though now you get access to a filesystem with flavors of MP4 that everyone has their own special blend of. At least you don't have to worry about tape transports anymore and drop-outs or a drop-frame or device dropping off the bus that could lock your whole system up because, my guess, Firewire hooks into the OS at a fairly low level and likes to misbehave. FW800 improved reliability a little, for drives. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to smash original Firewire gear though, drives, cameras, you name it. It's never to be trusted to just work.
-
yikes
-
Yeah, they had speed advantages over USB and USB2.0 but I've found that standard and those devices to generally be better behaved, regardless of platform, than any version of Firewire technology I've ever used. I'm kinda glad it's over because it never lived up to its potential as a standard, either because of poor implementation by the hardware manufacturers or meddling by groups like the MPAA.
-
My personal experience with Firewire on PC was easy. I used Win XP, a motherboard (A8N-SLI) with built in ports and a Sony DV-8 Camera.
Windows picks up the camera and could actually display a stream from the camera without running any video editing software.
Each camera would be seen as a separate device and all the video capture software I have ever used allows you to select from the range of available cameras or video inputs.
For editing I used Pinnacle, Windows Movie Maker and various ULead products.
The only issue I ever properly had was a Camera not being picked up by Windows 7 correctly - it would detect something but not a camera. It turned out the cable was faulty.
For Amiga, there appears to be MorphOS driver on Aminet http://aminet.net/driver/other/Helios_0.4-svn_r560.lha. I don;t know what this is for exactly but connecting things require a driver for the actual input device e.g. the firewire port, and another driver for the device you connect to it, just like USB.
All of the expansion cards I can see for Firewire are PCI or Cardbus so plugging into a standard classic Amiga isn't possible and there wouldn't be enough speed to use the camera effectively.
-
Not only does Morphos have a built in Firewwire stack (Called Helios) but there has been people using Yomgui's port of Blender to edit the video! So Yes
-
I wonder if there are any apps. that will let a user use more than one usb camera at a time.
In the pc world the discussion sounded like the fire wire discussion. It looks like two usb cams trying to use the same driver. What I would like is to see is a way to make a low cost camer switcher.
-
My personal experience with Firewire on PC was easy. I used Win XP, a motherboard (A8N-SLI) with built in ports and a Sony DV-8 Camera.
It would be unexpectedly ironic that consumer cameras might be more reliable than professional/prosumer gear.
All of the expansion cards I can see for Firewire are PCI or Cardbus so plugging into a standard classic Amiga isn't possible and there wouldn't be enough speed to use the camera effectively.
DV is only a little over 3M/sec. The compression/decompression is what's going to be more problematic. You likely need at least a very fast 604e if you don't have dedicated DV hardware on the interface board or better yet at least a 300MHz G3 to be comfortable doing it in software. The slightly slower G3 iMacs, the early candy colored models, they could do it but just barely at 233MHz (this was just handling the stream I/O and showing a proxy version on the monitor, it couldn't decode at full quality to the monitor in realtime).
-
Firewire hooks into the OS at a fairly low level and likes to misbehave.
It's worse than that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wki66w1iJHA
You can pwn a machine from firewire as it allows the device to read or write data at any address in the host.
-
Yowch!
Well, I'm just glad it's on its way out. It had such promise but after you've troubleshot mounting issues more than a few times and boot hangs and cameras bringing down not just an application but the host OS it becomes clear there's some fundamental design problems the technology.
I know I'm not going to miss doing back-ups to a Firewire raid and getting that sick feeling in my gut through the entire process, hoping the mount didn't drop off mid transfer, but also for the anticipation first plugging it in. Will it mount? Is it buggered?
-
There is the Firewire Stack Helios for MorphOS, which supports firewire drives very nicly.
I use it all the time to backup/restore by systems. It is hell faster and more stable than USB.
It also supports cameras, but I do not know if it is available yet. Yomgui once posted a video where he played several videos from firewire while recording with firewire.
Geit