Sony videocam w/ USB

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> 
> Yes, the "local storage" is a tape drive. And given that the camera has 
> only a dozen hours of use in five years, I have a hard time justifying 
> an upgrade. It's totally adequate for the intended use as an easy to use 
> movie camera for a non-camera person. I'd like to get data out pre 
> split, I can split it if absolutely necessary. :-(

OK Bill,
	You got me interested enough that I went to the SONY WWW site and I 
found the use manual for your camera:

	http://www.docs.sony.com/release/DCRTRV260.pdf

It mentions that your camera has the following 3 options:

	A/V out.  I'm not sure if this is 1 cable with lots of connectors, or 
many cables, but supposedly it can play to the standard RCA inputs on 
your VCR (or to an MPEG encoder video capture card).
I own a Happauge PVR-350 and use it to record TV directly from my analog 
cable input, but this card (and others like it) are also capable of 
recording from an A/V input or even from an S-Video input.  And since it 
contains an MPEG-2 encoder on the card, the result is an MPEG stream 
that you can write directly to an .mpg file if you so desire.  I've even 
used a fairly simple script to transcode the .mpg files to a format 
suitable for burning onto DVDs.  If your input is clean (digital 
quality), so should your capture be as well.  You've already mentioned 
that you don't think you want to do an NTSC capture, so that leaves:

	i.LNK in/out.  The manual states that your i.lnk port is better known 
as ieee1394 (which is firewire).  It also claims that this is a DV port. 
  So, do you have a firewire capture on your computer?  dvgrab is 
supposed to be able to capture firewire input for you.  Perhaps a 
firewire PCI card could help?  My laptop has an ieee1394a port, but not 
everyone does.

	USB jack.  Here the manual states that the USB jack can be used with a 
program on your application disk.  It calls the output a USB stream. 
This strongly suggests that one of the previously suggested solutions 
(like kino or dvgrab) might be able to be used to capture the stream 
directly if the program supports using the USB connection for input. 
The dvgrab man page doesn't mention any support for capturing from USB 
(seems silly though as USB and firewire are used similarly in this 
regard, but the hardware is very different).  What you need is some 
software to read the stream from the USB port (similar to dvgrab) and 
provide an interface (like /dev/video0) that you can then use to save 
the stream to disk like my video capture card does.

I hope this helps!

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)