Bug 64951

Summary:	Canon MVX200 not found by dvgrab (was: Upgraded to 12.04 and find the legacy firewire stack is no longer available)
Product:	Drivers	Reporter:	Nabeel (hafiz_nabeel91)
Component:	IEEE1394	Assignee:	drivers_ieee1394
Status:	NEEDINFO ---
Severity:	normal	CC:	alan, stefanr
Priority:	P1
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Kernel Version:	3.4	Subsystem:
Regression:	No	Bisected commit-id:

Description Nabeel 2013-11-14 13:46:07 UTC

I used this stack for DV capture via a Firewire PCI card. Prior to 11.10, I disabled juju (it wouldn't see the camera or DV deck) and the legacy stack worked fine.

I'm unable to locate the legacy stack and, thus, am stuck without DV capture firewire support. So my preference is either to:

1) Get the new juju firewire stack to function properly for DV capture/digitalizing.

or

2) Obtain and use the legacy firewire stack.

Am aware this is an on going issue. Still, any ideas?

Ubuntu sees the firewire PCI card but not the connected DV deck/camera:

02:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Agere Systems FW322/323 (rev 61)

Also have tried a PCI 1394 card with a different chipset:

02:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev 46)

miniDV camera using: Canon MVX200.

DVgrab reports no camera available:

$ dvgrab -i
Error: no camera exists

Have reviewed and tried the Ubuntu user documents (now outdated) to enable 1394 to capture video from a DV camera without success.

I suppose I could use a live CD for an older version of Ubuntu for capture or dual boot. Those options seem rather silly as, surely, firewire DV camera capture should be supported in the latest kernel.

This would seem even more important (at least to those of us who cut video and wish to do so on a Linux box) as the free, Open Source Lightworks for Linux is only months away from release.

Comment 1 Alan 2013-11-18 14:38:33 UTC

This isn't a support forum. You are probably going to get best results asking the firewire mailing lists/maintainers.

Comment 2 Stefan Richter 2013-11-19 08:49:52 UTC

Alan,

This may or may not be a kernel driver bug.  Bugzilla traffic regarding Drivers-IEEE1394 is copied to linux1394-devel, with a moderation delay.

Nabeel,

the newer firewire stack has generally been working well for DV since before the older ieee1394 stack was removed from the mainline kernel.  (Otherwise, removing the older stack would not have been an option in the first place.)  Let us find out why the newer stack does not yet work for you.

Which libraw1394 version do you have?  Libraw1394 2.0.8 contains a fix for detection and control of various old camcorder models.  I suspect though that your camcorder is of a newer kind than those addressed by that library update.  Still, it would be good to update libraw1394 to 2.0.8 or later if there is still an older one installed.  The current stable release of libraw1394 is 2.1.0.

While the camcorder is plugged in and switched on, what is the output of the following two commands?
$ grep . /sys/bus/firewire/devices/*/*
$ ls -l /dev/fw*