Comment by mysteria
1 day ago
I archived all my MiniDV tapes using a cheap firewire card and dvgrab on Linux, it can be set to automatically split noncontinous clips into different files for easy viewing. It's very straightforward to use and can be done unattended.
Just thinking back 10 years ago when I was arching all my DV tapes on my Dad's old G5... I did it all by hand through Final Cut Express. It would've been sooo much easier had I known about dvgrab back then!
Also ripped all my old MiniDV tapes a decade ago or so. (I don't remember it being tedious.) (I recall about 12GB for each 60min tape, FWIW.)
I've known for some time now not to trust media formats to remain easy to access as time goes on. Floppy disks, ZIP disks, SCSI…
So nice the home movies are now in the cloud (and on USB drives as additional backup).
I'd heard a few horror stories about people doing it on Windows and Mac, with bad compatibility and annoying software. With dvgrab it's super simple.
DVIO [0] and WinDV [1] would be the closest equivalents to dvgrab on Windows. Both are super easy to use (especially the former).
For HD DV tapes there's also HDVSplit [2].
[0] https://www.videohelp.com/software/DVIO
[1] https://www.videohelp.com/software/WinDV
[2] https://www.videohelp.com/software/HDVSplit
Firewire support was removed from the Linux kernel so I had to switch to Mint Linux to accomplish the same thing
> Firewire support was removed from the Linux kernel
This is very much incorrect. Maybe the subsystem wasn't built into a custom kernel you're using?
edit: google says improvements through 2026, support through 2029
Many distros (including Raspberry Pi OS) don't enable `CONFIG_FIREWIRE_OHCI` in the kernel, so support isn't built-in, unless you build your own kernel.
But yes, it will be supported through 2029, and then after that, it could remain in the kernel longer, there's no mandate to remove it if I'm reading the maintenance status correctly: https://ieee1394.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/#maintenance-sche...
> [After 2029, it] would be possibly removed from Linux operating system any day
1 reply →
This was around 2020 or 2021. I had an old laptop with a firewire port which was already running Ubuntu. I couldn't make it work. That's when I found that the support was removed from the kernel, and that's what led me to Linux Mint. I bought a new SSD and installed Linux Mint, and I was able to import my video tapes with no further issue.
An Ubuntu support page says eth1394 has been removed from the kernel since version 2.6.22.
Edit: This was a VERY old laptop. I think it has a 32 bit processor. Maybe that confounded the issue.