Hi all, This started out to be a request for help, but I ended up working it out myself, so I'm sending this just to report what I did, in case someone else tries to do the same.
I recently got a digital video camcorder (Panasonic PV-GS29), which has DV I/O using IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire or I.Link). The manual says it will work with any OHCI compliant card. I didn't have any IEEE-1394 ports on my PC, so I bought a Sabrent SBT-VT6306 IEEE 1394 card, which claims to be OHCI compliant (and was the cheapest one available, $17). It came with the 4-pin to 6-pin cable I needed to connect to the camcorder. The card was detected properly (showed up in lspci), but the kernel modules didn't get loaded (I think I read that this is a known problem with the IEEE-1394 support), so I had to add dv1394 to /etc/modprobe.preload. This had the side-effect of loading eth1394, a driver for ethernet-over-1394, which caused the ethernet problem I described in a previous message. I eventually got that sorted out by editing /etc/iftab and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*. Mandriva sets up new NICs with DHCP by default, and somehow both were given the same IP address, even though they have different MAC addresses and my router is set to assign IPs by MAC address. Never did figure that out. I just set eth1 (the eth1394 device, after I straightened out the numbering) to use a static IP in a different range that that assigned by my router. With that out of the way, I urpmi'd kino 0.7.6 and dvgrab 1.8. Both of these saw the camcorder, and were able to operate it's A/V controls (Play, Pause, ...), but couldn't capture any video. Both ran like they were capturing, but at the end reported an error with no explanation of what the error was (dvgrab just said "Error: No DV"). After much investigation and experimentation, and a modest amount of hair-pulling, I concluded that the various DV-related packages for Mandriva (not sure if these come from Mandriva or other sources) are just too old, and are basically broken. I started by downloading the tarball for the latest stable version of kino, 0.9.2. While trying to configure and make this, I ended up doing the same for libdv 1.0.0 (urpmi gave 0.104), libavc1394 0.5.3 (urpmi: 0.5.1), libiec61883 1.1.0 (urpmi: 1.0.0), and libraw1394 1.2.1 (urpmi: 1.2.0). Along the way, I discovered gscanbus 0.7.1, which is useful in debugging 1394 problems. Not quite "dependency hell", but it took about a week of spare time to get all this compiled and installed. When I was done, kino worked. I was able to capture video (and the corresponding audio), edit it, export it to dvd-format mpeg, feed that into dvdauthor and mkisofs, and burn it to a dvd. I didn't try dvgrab again, since kino does a lot more for me. BTW, instead of just doing a "make install", I used checkinstall to create rpm's and then urpmi'd them. If anyone is interested, I can provide the rpm files I created. They don't follow Mandriva conventions like having separate -devel packages or creating menu entries. Also, I configured them with the default prefix, so they install into /usr/local/* instead of /usr/*. And I don't have a website to make them available on. "As is, where is" 8^). Ron -- Opinions are mine. Don't blame anyone else. Rely on them at your own risk. ____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from Mandriva? Go to http://store.mandriva.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrivaclub.com ____________________________________________________
