Capturing DV in Kubuntu Linux

By
Svein
– August 30, 2010Posted in: Feature, Linux, Tutorials and tips

I generally prefer to have a good graphics interface to the things I do as it helps my productivity a lot. Why? Because I do not have to look up any commands every time I need to do something. There can be many weeks or months between the times when I need a specific thing done, and that is more than enough for me to forget it.

So what do I do when I really have to use the commandline? Write a blog post about it, of course!

This time I needed to capture some footage from my DV camera. I tried three different video editing packages, and only one of them had an interface for capturing from DV – Kdenlive. But it did not recognize the source, so no capturing possible. A little searching and I found a post about some problems with firewire in Ubuntu 10.04. The solution is simple enough. Open a terminal window and type this

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf

The file will look like this:

# Select the legacy firewire stack over the new CONFIG_FIREWIRE one.
#blacklist ohci1394
#blacklist sbp2
#blacklist dv1394
#blacklist raw1394
#blacklist video1394

blacklist firewire-ohci
blacklist firewire-sbp2

The hash marks need to be switched around so it will look like this:

# Select the legacy firewire stack over the new CONFIG_FIREWIRE one.
blacklist ohci1394
blacklist sbp2
blacklist dv1394
blacklist raw1394
blacklist video1394

#blacklist firewire-ohci
#blacklist firewire-sbp2

After this has been done you need to run the following command and then re-boot your computer:

sudo update-initramfs -k all -u

When this is done, you should install a package called dvgrab. This one makes it possible to capture DV quite reliably and easy from the commandline via USB and FireWire/IEEE1394 interfaces. Install it with this command:

sudo apt-get install dvgrab

To capture video, attach your DV player or camcorder to your PC with a FireWire or USB cable, then go to the folder where you want to store the video and issue this command:

dvgrab --format raw --noavc capture

This will start dvgrab and it will wait for incoming DV and start capturing as soon as it senses the incoming video. You have to control this with the play and shuttle buttons on the player device. This is what it looks like while it is running:

svein@Laptop:/home/Video$ dvgrab --format raw --noavc capture
Found AV/C device with GUID 0x080046010400715d
Waiting for DV...
Capture Started
"capture001.dv":   999.89 MiB  7281 frames timecode 00:04:51.07 date 2010.08.16 21:23:05
"capture002.dv":   753.25 MiB 5485 frames timecode 00:00:00.00 date 2010.08.19 16:52:01
Capture Stopped

After I reached the end of the footage, I simply pressed CTRL-C to stop capturing. I could then import the material in Kdenlive for editing.

Kdenlive has a lot of really good features, but has an unfortunately clumsy way of doing some things and some non-standard ways of laying things out in the UI. It could easily become a great tool for video editing, even for professional news production and a lot of internet TV and broadcasters in developing countries and new democrasies would benefit from it! I will get back with another post with a review of Kdenlive.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

About Svein

After living in Norway for over 40 years, I have moved to Brazil. I still sometimes travel to Norway to work, but aim at making those trips shorter and shorter. My worklife has been spent in the professional broadcast area. I have been doing regular production, both recorded and live shows. And I have been working for one of the major suppliers of editing systems, Avid Technology. The last few years I have done a lot of training and teaching. It is a very rewarding kind of work and no two days are the same. I also spend some time hacking together websites and tell people about the benefits of having websites with content management systems - CMS and lately also about the advantages of Linux. My preferred flavour is called Kubuntu.