Hi all

I have an JVC GR-DVP9 camcorder and recently used USB to capture DV, but the results were poor. Having read many threads I decided to buy a firewire PCI card and have just installed it. (NEC OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller as shown in device manager).

The card is seen in the device manager and seems fine. When I plug in camcorder the usual double bleep is heard indicating that the device is connected (like USB).

The problem is.....when using various capture software (incl. Power Director 3, Sony Vegas 5, Movie Maker 2, etc) and i try to capture video as normal, the device is found but it fails to initialise the connection and hangs the software. this happens to all software! I have tried the cable in a different firewire port on the card and even tried a different cable but the same happens.

Please HELP - I so want it to work but cant figure out why it wont!!!

Wilbur750

[MarkE19]

Have you put the camcorder into replay/VCR mode or whatever it is called on your cam? If the cam is in normal record mode then the software cannot control the device and therefore the connection would fail to initalise.

Mark.

Yes I have. The software sees the device even though it doesnt say the camcorder make and model as it used to - its now a Microsoft DV device. You can also see the time so far on the tape.

It seems to partly work, but the main capture bit doesnt. I thought it might be drivers but the JVC disk that came with the cam is for USB only - not firewire.

One other thing - I cant control the cam with the software either.

Hope this helps!

[MarkE19]

What are the specs of the PC? How much disk space do you have spare?
All versions from Windows 98se have all the required drivers as part of the OS, therefore firewire does not need any drivers to work.
Can you also give more details on what happens when you try to capture - ie any error messages displayed, what the cam does (if anything) etc. Also what else is running on the PC?

Mark.

Specs of pc are:

Athlon 2800
1GB RAM
120GB HDD (20GB free)
Win XP
256RAM AGP NVidia GEFORCE 5600

There are other software running.....but this hasnt caused a prob in the past with usb.

Prob loads really...does this matter with firewire? System handles most things with ease regardless of other apps running.

Cheers

Hi

forget to say....there's no error messages really

Software just hangs

Wilbur750

[MarkE19]

Well from what you have told me there is no real reason that I can think of for the PC to hang during capture. The specs are way more than is required!
The only thing I can rally say is that you are very short on disk space. A 1 hour DV tape will take up around 14Gb of disk space. Add to that extra space for the editng and file conversion and you will not be able to get it all on the disk.Also as a HDD becomes full its performance becomes slower, files get fragmented far more etc. I would suggest you add another HDD, but only use this for video capture. Don't install any programs on it.
Also make sure that DMA is enabled for the HDD.

Other than that I can't see what else I can suggest. Perhaps somebody else will have some good ideas.

Good luck,
Mark.

[asimmd]

Hi Wilbur
Only By a process of elimination will you resolve the problem.
If you believe that the Firewire card and leads are O.K then you need to look at the video editing progs and whether they will recognise your camcorder.
First job,uninstall the firewire card and put it in a different slot in the computer,then presuming you are using XP with Service Pack 2 update try to get Microsofts Movie Maker to recognise the camcorder.
There's no point going any further until you try this,I think it's fair to say that if Movie Maker dosen't recognise the camera there's no point trying the expensive software.
Regards
Alan

Thanks all....

The software has captured the video before via USB so that can be ruled out. Also, I havent got XP SP2 - I installed it once and loads of software died. I dont trust it so reverted back to SP1. I know that I will miss out on future updates but dont really care at the moment. Surely I dont need SP2 to get this firewire to work?!

I know I should get another HDD which I may do soon but want to get it working first. I have Diskeeper Pro running and defrags my HDD daily and even though the HDD is quite full it always runs quickly. So dont think its that.

I am not convinced that the driver is OK. When i installed the USB drivers, when I connect it via USB, two devices appear...one JVC labelled device for audio and another JVC labelled device for video. Why does the system now see a 'Microsoft DV device'? mmmmm

Also, checked camcorder, and there no option on it to 'allow' dv transfer. You just connect it and thats it.

Can anyone else help?

[asimmd]

Wilbur
I shall try and be polite about this,do you want to fix your problem,or just talk about it?
As far as I can see,you have'nt tried one suggestion mentioned.
Forget U.S.B, Firewire is needed so you don't get dropped frames,you dont need a driver for Firewire,XP automatically recognises it and initialises.
Of all the people I know, installing Service Pack2 will not cause software to crash if it previously ran on XP.
Service Pack 2 deals more with security matters than software issues.
I am of course presuming that your software is legal,and not copied?
Regards
Alan