Fire Wire Camera

[Sean Cunningham]

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.

[AndyFC]

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.

[magnetic]

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

[trekiej]

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.

[Sean Cunningham]

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).

[psxphill]

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.

[Sean Cunningham]

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?

[Geit]

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