Sweet! I got dvgrab working on my box, and I successfully grabbed an hour of digital video from my camcorder, scene by scene. I figure that at MPEG1 compression, I can get about 2 hours of video and audio onto a standard CDROM. That mean that I can take all nine hours of video that I have from Melody's birth onwards and put them all on about 4 CD-Rs. This will also be a lot easier to burn and distribute than copying the DV to videotape directly. Interestingly, ~1 hour of (almost raw) video and audio is 11.4 GB of data. Now I know how many hard disks I need to buy for my ultimate DV/NAS box.

Broadcast 2000

I also now have a reason for 100Mbps in the house - I have been unable to get Broadcast 2000 to run on my debian box. In the meantime I'm stuck with a windoze box running Ulead VideoStudio 4.0 SE Basic - basically the video editing software that came with the Firewire card I bought. I also found that I can't use xanim to display MPEGs made in this process. I can use realvideo files that it generates, however. When will we get a decent video viewer for Linux? Something that can view quicktime and newer MPEG streams?

PCMCIA Firewire Cards

By the way, don't ever get a PCMCIA Firewire card. I got one, and it is essentially useless for capturing video. Lots of dropped frames, lost audio, the works. Funny, a PCI card from the same vendor shows no such problems, even with a Pentium Pro 200 CPU. I guess that just shows ya that PCI is a MUCH faster bus than PCMCIA - even cardbus - even a 33MHz PCI bus.

Next Project

Must get more disks for new NAS box, and must get 100BT switch for the living room...