Using a video camera with Mandrake

I have a Sony DCR-PC1E video camera with a Firewire (IEEE1394) interface. Here is a simple description of how to use it with Mandrriva Linux The procedure may be different for other cameras. I do not know I do not have any others.

Hardware/Software used

Lucent FW323 FireWire PCI card

Sony DCR-PC1E video camera

Kino video editing software

I use Kino in preference to cinelerra because for a casual user I find it more user friendly.

Loading the modules

Before the camera can be used the correct kernel modules must be loaded. It may be that recent versions of Mandriva installs the correct module by default.

Check that the file /etc/modprone.conf contains the line :-

alias ieee1394-controller ohci1394

Now reboot and the Firewire card should be recognised and the module loaded. You can confirm this with in a root terminal.

# lsmod | grep 1394
ohci1394               33540  1 dv1394
ieee1394              104376  3 ohci1394

Now try out the video camera

If you plug the firewire cable into the video camera and set the camera to 'Player' mode and run the previous command again you should see more modules have loaded.

# lsmod | grep 1394
raw1394                31340  0
dv1394                 21452  0
ohci1394               33540  1 dv1394
ieee1394              104376  3 raw1394,dv1394,ohci1394

Loading of the modules is now complete, but we are not quite finished yet.

Setting permissions

If you start kino at this point and go into the 'Preferences' window, then you are likely to see a message saying that the "IEEE1394" system is not running". However if you start kino from a root terminal window, then it is likely that it will work and you will see the ieee1394 configuration window.

The reason ieee1394 does not seem to work for a normal user is because we must assign the users the right to use ieee1394 devices. Linux is a multiuser system. It may be that some users are not trusted to use specific hardware components, so there is a file called /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default.perms to define what hardware devices console users may have access to.

In my case I decided to give users of the firewire devices the same rights as for digital cameras, so I added this line in console.perms

<camera>=/mnt/camera* /dev/usb/dc2xx* /dev/usb/mdc800* /dev/raw1394

Now on rebooting (not sure it is required), you should find that kino will run as a normal user and find the ieee1394 subsystem.

Using Kino

Kino is quite straightforward to use. All I had to do in my case was to ensure the input source in the iee1394 preferences was set to /dev/raw1394

Simply pressing the 'Play' button on the camera would display the video image in kino, and selecting 'Capture' would save the recording to hard disc.

Monday 19th April 2004