Video camera & FireWire (IEE1394)

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A common problem with fire wire capturing is that the raw1394 (capturing) and dv1394 (export) modules do not start up at boot. This can be solved. This post on the BXLUG website explains how to make a small script that will load the firewire modules at start up.
http://www.bxlug.be/articles/220

In an open terminal for root, edit the file /etc/modules to add the following lines:

raw1394
video1394

That will load the FireWire modules at startup. To avoid restarting, you can:

modprobe raw1394
modprobe video1394

Then insure the device is present in /dev. To do that, several methods are applicable. The following one will always work. Create a script /etc/init.d/firewire with the following content:

#! /bin/sh

test -e /dev/raw1394 || mknod -m 666 /dev/raw1394 c 171 0

Make it executable:

chmod +x /etc/init.d/firewire

Establish the link to automatically startup the script at boot:

ln -s /etc/init.d/firewire /etc/rcS.d/S10firewire

Once again, it could be useful to restart to test it, but it is not absolutely necessary, you can do the same by executing the script yourself now like so:

/etc/init.d/firewire

And you’re up! The DV camera will now be recognized by Kino. It’s up to you now!

Posted on: Monday, October 9, 2006 by: in category: Editing software, Hardware, Manuals, Problems and solutions