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Real Time Video Stream over Firewire? 63

Posted by Cliff from the high-quality-webcams dept.
videomotion asks: "Digital camcorders from Sony and others are very handy gadgets. It is easy to capture or download on to the PC what you have previously recorded on the camcorder's digital tape. It would be wonderful if the same Firewire interface could be used to stream real time video to your PC for cool machine vision applications or for direct capturing of video onto the hard drive. Is it possible get the real time video stream from the Sony digital camcorder (DCR-PC100) through the Firewire cable and display the video picture on your computer screen?"
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Real Time Video Stream over Firewire? More

Real Time Video Stream over Firewire?

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  • I saw one of the old Mac G4 Cubes (Or maybe it was a G3?) do this. I doubt it was the same brand of camera, but it was firewire and it was _very_ cool.
    • Yes, Macs do this VERY easely. Step by step:

      0)Connect the camera to the firewire port

      01)Open iMovie

      10)click the import tab

      11)Click import/play and watch your disk space meter turn from green to red. About every 9 minutes 48 seconds of continuous video, the computer will automatically split the video into a new clip.

      You can then edit and do other stuff, like add weird titles and export to DVD. If you are asking whether you can compress movies on the fly...Well, plan on spending 20-40K on an Avid suite.
    • I've done this with my original dual-usb iBook as well...in short, buy a Mac.
  • Most firewire video cameras, and some USB ones just automatically show up as attached video devices, and so can be accessed through VFW or WDM, in the exact same way you grab an image/stream off a webcam. It makes no difference that it's Firewire, or that it's a DV cam as opposed to a webcam.

    For example, many of my users use Sony, Canon and JVC DV cameras in my machine-vision application, Freelook [freelook.org].

  • The only solution. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @04:08AM (#8653851) Journal
    ...dude, buy a Mac. Now. Don't ask, just do it. If you like stuff like this you won't regret it.

    Step 1. Connect firewire cam into Mac.

    Thats it - iMovie will open up and you can watch the video live or record it and start editing.

    If you want to watch TV, at work for media aquisition I've just got an Elgato eyeTV [elgato.com] box which will receive TV and work as a PVR. The bit I like most is you get a years subscription to a website that has all the TV schedules, and you can decide what you want the PVR to record. i.e. I can sit here at home, browse a website for a TV program, click one button, and it will be recorded by the PVR at work. The eyeTV software checks into the site every hour and updates it's list of what you want to record. The video is stored as standard MPEG-2, however even though I have the Pro version of Quicktime 6.5 and the MPEG2 component, I can watch the exported movies but I can't export them with sound so be wary of that.

    Yes I know PC's can do similar things, but having worked with digital video for around 8 years now, I have to say that the Mac kicks the arse of everything when it comes to video editing. The reason? Standard hardware and good software. One person's Powerbook 1Ghz is exactly the same as anothers meaning that the software authors have less disparate hardware to worry about.

    • Re:The only solution. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by jhoger ( 519683 )
      A) The guy doesn't have a Mac. He's a PC user. He wants advice on how to do something that's completely possible with a PC. That it can be done on a different platform is, well, totally irrelevant.

      B) PC users have perfectly good reasons to preferring the open architecture of the PC over the closed Mac monoculture. No vendor lock-in, ability to repair things yourself, less $$$'s, more friends in same boat, more software, etc.

      C) Mac is a whole different universe. I'm a CS grad, and every time I have sat dow

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @09:50AM (#8655268)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • A) The guy doesn't have a Mac. He's a PC user. He wants advice on how to do something that's completely possible with a PC. That it can be done on a different platform is, well, totally irrelevant.

        Not totally. If it can be done with a Mac, it should be possible with a PC. All you should need is the right application that will display an incoming DV stream without saving it to disk. If another platform does it, it at least says it is possible.

        There are Firewire webcams sold that aren't restricted to ju
    • "Step 1. Connect firewire cam into Mac. Thats it - iMovie will open up and you can watch the video live or record it and start editing. " I have to say that the Mac kicks the arse of everything when it comes to video editing. The reason? Standard hardware and good software. " Hmm...odd...I worked at my town's TV studio for two years, and under the guidance of people like you (and I mean Mac/Multimedia zealots) Bought a set of three IMacs for video editing. It was weird, because despite their "standard h
      • You say for two years - was this using Jaguar / Panther or OS9?

        OS9 is completely unstable and useless. It freezes a lot, especially when connected a network (TIP make OS9 stable for editing - completely disable all networking components). The modern iMac should be fine for video editing (please tell me you didnt use the little CRT model?), however I think the FSB is a little slower - really if you are serious you want a Power class Mac.

        As for my experience of PC editing (I used to teach and build DV edi
    • "The only solution" - right. Windows can do all of that, and the hardware is much cheaper.

      Standard hardware? There's only 1 or 2 Firewire chipsets out there (funnily enough, the same ones Macs use). Windows provides cross-hardware support (via DirectX drivers and DirectShow filters), so you don't have to worry about your graphics card, sound card or even codecs. The old "standard hardware" argument is years old now, and holds no water.

      Premiere Pro on XP is just as good as any video editing software on

      • Sorry, but Premiere Pro is still a toy nle. It's more advanced than it used to be, but it's still really only acceptable for hobbyist/student level work.
        • Premiere is not an Avid Symphony (used by national geographic) or a FCP (used everywhere. Recently : Cold Mountain), but it IS capable of quite a bit. A lot of ad agencies use it, and a lot of independent film makers use it before onlining and layback. True, the other systems are better, but Adobe did OK with Premiere.
    • As Dr. Covey would say "seek first to understand, then to be understood". You didn't listen to the question because your Mac fanatacism got in the way.

      The guy is not complaining about what a PC will or will not let him do, but what the camera will not let him do. He could move to a Mac and that wouldn't change the fact that - according to the questioner - Sony cams don't appear to send a live video feed over Firewire.
      • I plug my sony cam into my iMac at home all the time and get a live video stream. I can do it in iMovie or in iChat.

        I can set the camcorder on a shelf, and have it point at the room on one Mac, then over iChat have a 640x480 24 fps video feed over my wireless network to my powerbook in another room.

        The problem is definitely with his PC, not the Sony camcorder.
    • I agree. I have three PCs with Firewire (all running Linux -- Fedora Core). Three different chipsets. I can't get any of them to work (at least not reliably). Sometimes they'll work continuously for several days before failing. Yes, I've reported the problems to the Linux IEEE1394 project; the problems remain even two years later. Yes, I even tried with the 2.6 kernel.

      You may find a specific chipset/platform combination that works reliably on the PC, but that may mean buying a new PC and/or Firewire
    • I couldn't have said it better. It has never occurred to me that this might be difficult.
  • I used a Canon firewire-enabled camera as my video hook into iChatAV. Take the tape out, and leave it running. In other words, buy a Mac :-)

    • Re:Before iSight... (Score:4, Informative)

      by vranash ( 594439 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @05:07AM (#8654068)
      On this same note, plug it into your linuxbox, and run either avplay, or avgrab (to save to disk) and you can watch or record your stream in realtime, complete with audio :) Hell, if you absolutely must have a GUI, Kino is looking pretty nice for minimalist stuff, and cinelerra is pretty impressive too if you can deal with it's rough edges. Seriously, having just gotten my Mini-DV Canon yesterday, I can tell you DV firewire cameras have to be the easiest devices to set up in linux, windows, and mac with the exception of maybe USB keyboards (seeing as X isn't very user-friendly to plug'n'play input devices) -- vranash
    • so iChatAV is the reason people buy Macs? I always thought it was the colors and the users club....
    • Nah, don't buy a Mac because of the software... any other computer can do the same thing.

      Buy a Mac because they are "hip" and "cool." Mmm, marketing.
  • I have a Panasonic NV-28 (no longer available, but the newer models are basically the same) and it does this just fine. There's significant latency though - about a quarter of a second, so pointing the camera at the screen [showing the video] doesn't quite work as well as it does on a proper setup. This may well be due to the fact that the machine doing this is a 400mhz G4, which can only *just* capture video at full speed, assuming I run in OS 9 (no pre-emption) and kill every other app (including the Fi

  • Windows XP has support for this... (Score:4, Informative)

    by samrolken ( 246301 ) <samrolken@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @04:23AM (#8653907)
    In Windows XP, you can just plug in about any camera, including firewire ones, and open the camera's entry in My Computer, and that's what you get. You can then take that and run it through Windows Media Encoder, or about anything else that can handle the standard Windows video capture APIs. I do it all the time.
  • So, you bought a digital video camera, and now you want to know if the camera can display video on .. a ... computer monitor.

    If that Sony POS can't do realtime video, I would never buy one. I'm not really into digital video, but all the analog cameras I've used will just output video by default whenever they're on.

    Just as an aside, could you use video over 1394 to set up a real-time video processing cluster, like you can with audio and lightpipe?
  • DV over Firewire / TS over firewire (MPEG-2 Transport Stream : DTV) is easy, assuming you have software to play the images back. You'll only really start to get issues when you start working with HDTV (And I'm specifically referring to the Japanese broadcast standards here, I'm unfamiliar with the American ones)

    • Re:Easy (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 3waygeek ( 58990 )
      Interesting you should bring up HDTV; I'm in the middle of setting up a HD PVR based on a G3 PowerMac I just bought on eBay.

      My digital cable box, the Motorola DCT-6200 [motorola.com], puts out a MPEG2-TS stream over its 1394 port. Using the VirtualDVHS [macfixit.com] package that's part of Apple's Firewire SDK, it should be possible to record [gmane.org] HD video; playback will probably require something a little beefier than the 300 MHz G3, but I have more powerful Windows boxen that can handle that.

      If you're a Linux guy, check out Linux1394 [linux1394.org]; i

  • Since when is this a big deal? (Score:3, Informative)

    by MatrixBandit ( 709610 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @04:55AM (#8654022) Journal
    I don't understand how this became a story. I do this all the time (and without a mac). I'm running Win2K but thats really irrelevant, and I'm using an old Cannon ZR10 DV camera, and I just hook up the firewire, set the camera in record mode (not playback) and set whatever sofware I'm using to capture (usually either Adobe Premiere or just Media Player Classic with its open device functionality) and boom! live video.

    I actually used this method to record some really neat feedback video with some very interesting natural effects just by throttling the exposure control on the camera.

    Also, using media player classic to record you have full control over what compression method, the end resolution, the end FPS, so you can setup your own surveilance system very easily if you wanted to and still not use that much hd space. (especially if you recorded at like 5 fps and later reviewed it at 60 fps it would be fairly painless (since it's easy to see someone walking around in your house, even at almost 10x the speed) Note: I also do this very thing with my webcam using media player classic.

    sortof off topic but if you haven't tried media player classic, I recommend doing a google on it. it plays flash and dvd's too, as well as having the ability to "open a device".

  • Daaamn.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dahan ( 130247 ) <khym@azeotrope.org> on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @05:08AM (#8654070)
    Worst

    Ask Slashdot

    Ever.

    If you know that you can play prerecorded tapes through the 1394 port, how about flipping the switch on the camera from VTR mode to Camera mode and see what happens?

    • Re:Daaamn.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by pineapples10 ( 685792 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @05:32AM (#8654138)
      Next Ask Slashdot: Im sick of paying Microsoft for their OS and/or Apple for their software/hardware. Is there some sort of free replacement operating system available? It would be great to find one with some sort of source code available. I know this is kind of a weird request, but has anyone heard of such a thing?
  • I'm sorry, but are you joking or something? Do you really think that this is really a valid Ask Slahdot post? It's not April 1st yet, so it isn't that. Are you smoking something weird?

    This question is akin to those who (after finding newgroups on OE), going straight to alt.folklore.computers & - seeing that it seems quite busy - asking "what does Missing Operating System" mean on their newly bought mass market POS.

    Oh, I was going to go on at length about the demise of the typical post etc but I can't
  • "It would be wonderful if the same Firewire interface could be used to stream real time video to your PC for cool machine vision applications or for direct capturing of video onto the hard drive. Is it possible get the real time video stream from the Sony digital camcorder (DCR-PC100) through the Firewire cable and display the video picture on your computer screen?"

    Yep. I've done this with a Sony Digital8 Cam + Premiere. The camera sends video footage down as long as it's on. It doesn't have to be 'pla
  • Is it possible get the real time video stream from the Sony digital camcorder (DCR-PC100) through the Firewire cable and display the video picture on your computer screen?"

    First of all, why doesnt it work? I dont have a sony, I have a cheapo samsung and it streams live video over its firewire interface just fine.

    If your sony doesnt do this buy a decent brand that does!

    It wouldnt surprise me if this is a deliberate crippling as part of some DRM strategy. Sony do own movie and music publishers remember. A
  • Im not sure if Im missing the point here, but what you are suggesting is a standard feature of firewire/dv camera's . I use Kino, I just plug in my camera and go to the preview screen and guess what i see what the camera is playing displayed on the computer... I really dont see how you thought this was difficult to do!

  • Slashdot is not the place to ask. (Score:5, Informative)

    by stickb0y ( 260670 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @07:59AM (#8654583)

    First, I'm going to have to agree with a lot of the other posters and say that this is a poor question for Ask Slashdot; it shouldn't have been hard to research on your own.

    Second, Slashdot is not the best place to ask. The quality of your responses would be much better from forums that focus on video capture, such as Ars Technica's Audio/Visual forum [arstechnica.com] and doom9.org's DV forum [doom9.org].

    Now, back to your question:

    With most DV camcorders, you should be able to feed a composite or s-video source into the camcorder, and then you can use whatever DV software you normally use. I've heard that there are a handful of DV camcorder models that require you to record to tape first, but I don't think they're Sony's. Unfortunately, there will be significant latency.

    As for some of the other Slashdot responses so far: No, you don't need a Mac, and no, you don't need Premiere. If you're using Windows and want a lightweight DV capturing app, try Scenalyzer Live! [scenalyzer.com] (~$40) or WinDV [mourek.cz] (free).

    Heck, on Windows, a DV camcorder should show up as a DirectShow capture device. If you don't care about recompressing the video stream (e.g. for machine vision), then you can use any DirectShow-based TV/capture app. There are a number of open-source ones out there (e.g. Virtual VCR [sourceforge.net]).

    • Thank you.

      I actually had the same problem as the poster. I have a DV camera, but wanted to be able to view the playback from the camera and a bigger than the 320x240 preview windows I was seeing. I can't buy a Mac, and I did Google for quite a bit (including on SourceForge) for DV playback. Somehow I didn't find it.

      I downloaded and installed WinDV and in less than 3 minutes I have it doing exactly what I wanted. Thanks again for not being a jacka** like some other uberelite posters.

      • Nobody's trying to be uberelite. videomotion didn't say that he was getting live video streamed in, but the picture was too small and his question was whether he could get a full-sized image; he was wondering if it was even possible to get a live video stream. This implies that he didn't even try the basic step of setting the camcorder to camera mode before Asking Slashdot about it.

        • Nobody's trying to be uberelite.

          When I posted my comment, the ratio was that a majority of the comments were either "You should have asked Ars-Technica" or "Buy a Mac / Do it on Linux." Examples:

          This question is akin to those who (after finding newgroups on OE), going straight to alt.folklore.computers & - seeing that it seems quite busy - asking "what does Missing Operating System" mean on their newly bought mass market POS.

          Oh, I was going to go on at length about the demise of the typical post etc

    • My Panasonic DVC-50 imports live or recording streams at the same real time rate regardless of previewing size. I can watch it at fullscreen at the same time if i like.

      If you are asking about applying effects on top of the imported DV in real-time you may need to pipe you dvgrab input to a few other things first.

      Actually, Kino has a live preview of effects at a reduced frame rate. Depending on your horsepower this may work.

      I think Mencoder may actually be ready for doing this sort of thing. Check int
  • IIRC, you just kinda plug them into your computer and it works... At least, kinda. I'm not sure, as I've only played with one for approximately 45 seconds, and then I was thrown out of the Apple store for wearing my WindowsXP shirt... But I digress.

    Here's some software that appears to do what you want, I think.

    Orangemicro.com [orangemicro.com]

    Full control over zoom and stuff like that. It looks pretty neat. I think I'll look up cheap firew-*ahem*-1394 cameras (now that I have my 1394 port of my own.) on one of those onl
  • Kino running on Linux will do this. If you're messing with DV on Linux, I'm really surprised you don't already know about Kino.
  • I have the Sony DCRTRV350 Digital 8cam corder [amazon.com] and it has built-in USB streaming for use as a webcam. It also has a firewire port but doesn't ship with the firewire cable.

    I haven't tried streaming with the firewire, since I don't have the cable, but I don't see why you would need firewire instead of USB - unless you have some tremendous amount of upstream bandwidth.
    • I haven't tried streaming with the firewire, since I don't have the cable, but I don't see why you would need firewire instead of USB - unless you have some tremendous amount of upstream bandwidth.

      If you're happy with the compressed and/or low-res video you can fit through the USB port, that's fine, but a full DV stream is around 25Mbps. "Full speed" USB can't do that; you'd need either firewire or "high speed" USB (2.0). However, I don't know of any cameras that have high speed USB ports--firewire is th

      • And where is that stream going to?

        If your just going to show it on your own screen, then wouldn't you be better of displaying it on a video monitor?

        If you are going to stream on the web - do you have an upload pipe bigger than USB 1.1? If so, then I think you can afford to get hardware that is designed for that prupose, rather than trying to a consumer product in an enterprise application that it was not designed for.

  • Many erroneous replies (Score:2, Informative)

    by swg101 ( 571879 )
    The software exists in Windows, Mac, and Linux, the issue is that the camera has to support it. Some cameras send nothing over the firewire port unless it is in playback mode. It doesn't matter if you are using a Mac if the hardware will not send data. I have found very little information easily accessible about which cameras will support this. Some manufacturers will answer your questions.

    For machine vision (which is why I have looked at this before), check out the firewire cameras at Point Grey Rese [ptgrey.com]

  • As long as the camera creates a live DV stream and puts it on the Firewire bus, it doesn't matter what platform or app you use.

    In fact, you should be able to connect two camcorders together and use one to record the live video of the other.

    Any software that allows you to import DV video from tape won't know the difference -- it's the same stream.

    (Unless really DUMB software insists on doing device-control and somehow turns the camera's live feed OFF explicitly)

    - Peter
  • A few minutes on Google or simple using "apt-cache search" show you how--the utilities for doing this are standard and widely available. You can use standard FW camcorders or get high-resolution FW cameras for machine vision applications. FW is the way to go for hooking up cameras for any kind of live video.
  • I have a Sony Digital-8 TRV-250 camcorder and I can do this with out any problem. I've used real time streaming over usb several times either for web chats via msn or the slightly less than real time Yahoo before. The big thing that sounds like what you need though is Sony's software that comes with the camera. PIXELA I believe has a mode that will let you record whatever the camera is seeing. It requires a fairly fast system to handle, but if it's possible over USB, then I'm sure that firewire won't be

  • No (Score:2)

    by aminorex ( 141494 )
    That's not possible. Not even with quantum
    superposition of states. It's actually a
    logical contradiction.
  • http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/DVTS/

    it not only displays the video, it will stream it unicast *or* multicast. IPv6 capable.

    Note that the windows client may have issues with multicast - it has a ttl of 1 which means it won't leave your lan.

    also note that this is a 30 megabit stream before trying it over your DSL.

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