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Capture MiniDV tapes via Firewire

Multiple ways to capture MiniDV material from tapes via a Firewire connection.

Until some years ago I was using a Canon MiniDV camcorder to record home videos, but since then I had switched to one using SD cards. I have about 40 tapes left which I wanted to capture for “posterity”, but it turned out that it was not as easy as I thought…

My first try was to do it on my (somewhat elderly) MacBook Pro. It still has a Firewire (IEEE 1394) port, and I quickly found out on the Internet that I should be able to grab video from the camera using iMovie. Well, that was indeed pretty straight-forward, apart from that I had strange issues with some tapes. For some tapes, iMovie would simply report “No data from device”, even though the tapes played well on the camcorder. I would write a large number of very small files to the Mac, instead of relatively few large ones that I expected according to the source material.

So I searched for alternatives.

I quickly came across a tool called WinDV which I had actually used 10 years ago already. 🙂 Turned out that the tool still works under Windows 10, which I found pretty amazing, and that it could capture some tapes I couldn’t capture using iMovie. Still, there were some tapes that not even WinDV could capture…

I resumed my search for a suitable tool, and then came across DVgrab, which runs under Linux (Ubuntu in my case). Apart from installing it, there was nothing to do, no device nodes to create, no permissions to be modified, etc.

To make a long story short, DVgrab seems to be the perfect tool for me. Completely non-interactive, which is a big pro in my eyes because it eliminates human error (to make sure settings are the same all the time), and it finally could capture the tapes the other tools couldn’t capture. I have no clue why they failed, as the tapes seemed to contain all the required info (actual, correct timecode).

Just for reference, this is the command-line I used:

dvgrab --autosplit --timestamp --size 0 --rewind Florida-

These parameters make sure the input is split automatically into separate files (starting with “Florida-“) if a discontinuity in the timecode is detected, the tool includes the timestamps from the timecode in the filenames, it creates files of unlimited size (otherwise it would split output in 1 GB chunks), and it will rewind the tape prior to capturing it. Output files will be named like  follows:

-rw-r--r-- 1 rabe rabe 149M Jan 26 21:32 Florida-2009.05.06_13-55-15.dv
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabe rabe  69M Jan 26 21:32 Florida-2009.05.06_14-25-25.dv

It can be that simple!

I hope you enjoyed this blog post. Please leave a message  if it was in any way helpful.

Update 2020-04-06: Karl suggested to add the -showstatus command-line option, which sounds like a good idea. This option makes it show the capture status during capture, updated for each frame.

By Ralf Bergs

Geek, computer guy, licensed and certified electrical and computer engineer, husband, best daddy.

40 replies on “Capture MiniDV tapes via Firewire”

Thanks for this article. On my daily driver with OS ubuntu mate 16.04 i’ve installed a pinnacle excaliber 4.1 card.
After installing dvgrab and connecting a old sony handycam i’ve succesfully extracted dv files from the tape from the command line. Super.

Thanks to you I am now able to get all my miniDV videos from my old Panasonic camcorder which were around 10 years old on to Windows 10 platform so I could keep our memories safe in a digital format. Thanks for the invaluable post and details.

Thank you also. I can now save my Sony Digital8 footage. I’m always amazed how easy Linux can make a task

Thank you, I was about to send my tapes away ($$$$) but using dvgrab was so much easier! I used a USB bootable Ubuntu, installed dvgrab (had to enable universe apt), and ran dvgrab. It failed the first time because I was writing the output to the USB (which I think had a file size limit), but I just mounted the local hard drive and reran the process and it worked flawlessly.

Yes very simple, but I don’t understand very well how I can manipulate the instruction “autosplit”. I would like to have some file just of 50Mbyte and not more or I could have file where I can change the frames as every file of 5 minutes or frames 7500. But I do believe that the corrects way is autosplit with frames chunks, right?

Ciao Paolo.

I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what exactly you are asking.

Moreover, it’s quite a while ago since I last used the tool, so I’m not very familiar with it anymore (actually I’ve never been “very familiar”, it was just sufficient to grab my MiniDV material)…

Please have a look at the documentation/man page again. I hope that you find there the answer to your question.

Best of luck!

This is the exact info I wanted to hear! I pulled out my old MacBook but ran in to the same thing you did. I also didn’t like the lack of settings available in iMovie. I’ve just ordered a Firewire adaptor for my PC… Once I do have the files, I’m assuming I can just play them back with VLC. Do you have any notes about editing or playback? Thanks again!

Hi Ben.

Indeed, you can use VLC to play the files back. Also, you can do basic trimming with VLC as well.

To be honest I haven’t had the time to edit the recordings yet, but doing it in iMovie should work…

Good luck with capturing your tapes. Let me know how it went…

Kind regards,

Ralf

Thanks for the article. I did this a year ago, and had forgotten the command syntax. Reading your article made me realize I should have used the autosplit feature on the previous 9 tapes! Thanks for posting this.

Ralf – so simple, so powerful.
Thank you and congratulation for this article.
This is exactly what I was looking for.

Hello Ralf,

I am very grateful to find your article! Our initial conditions are almost identical: 40-50+ Mini DV tapes recorded on Canon DV camcorder, first try with Mac iMovie and Firewire connection, problems with “No data from device” and writing a large number of very small files to the Mac, etc. So I will be happy to try Linux. But what kind of input port are you using on the Linux machine? USB-3? Or did you install a Firewire card?

I cannot seem to find a way to go from the Firewire High Speed DV connector on the Canon camcorder to a USB-3 connection, which is what I have on my Linux laptop. And I cannot find an outboard converter that will change Firewire to USB.

So maybe I need to build a system with Firewire card? Uuugh…

I would like to find an easier way.

Thank you for any further help you can offer!

-J

Hi Jay.

Sorry for the late response.

Unfortunately grabbing MiniDV material absolutely needs Firewire. It’s a built-in feature of the protocol, AFAIR, and definitely doesn’t work via USB. I still have several machines with Firewire ports built into them, or adapters (like for one of my Macs, where I can convert from Thunderbolt to Firewire).

There is no converter from USB to Firewire, again to the best of my knowledge. Do you have a PC Card slot in your laptop? Then it should be easy to get a Firewire card. Otherwise you might want to buy a cheap Firewire card for a PC, they only cost like $10 or $20.

Maybe any of the above helps?

Good luck.

Kr,

Ralf

Hi,
I got a biiig problem.
so.
I have a very old Sony DCR-HC17E and a Parasonic DV-GS14 from my Girlfriend.
We two in total got about 50 miniDV tapes and probably a dozend we did´n found jet.
I tryed to install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on an very old computer with a four pin firewire port. Took some time and I needet to whipe the drive (formating didnt work) to be able to install Linux (err: unable to create swap partition).
The next step?
DVgrab and kino
Or better: sudo apt-get install dvgrab kino
Bouth of them are unavailable. http://www.kinodv.org dosen´t exist anymore.
I was able to find another source but: error: missing libraw1394 …
Some more time later, I found and installed libraw1394 but: error: missing libavc1394-devel …
And im not able to find that anywere. I found and tryed many things accociated with that libary in the internet, but non worked. Still getting the same error.
Any sugesstions?
Any operating system btw, but I also wasn´t able to find some windows 7 (win10 woun´t run on the Firewire machine) programms for the job.
I hope somebody can help me here, seeing that some postes are from 2019/12 not from 2010 like anywere else.
So
I hope u can help me. The last option would be to record the cinch from the camera but having read a lot … bad software, old software, bad sound, bad video, no video, 20$ … so naaaaah
I want to go the fancy way XD, but yes … unable to get DVgrab to work 🙁
Yes I´m bad at keeping things short, thanks u ever read 😉

Hi Erik.

Thanks for reading my post. Let’s see whether I can help…

I did this in January, 2017, so maybe your choice of an Ubuntu version of 16.04 was pretty close. Could be the one I was using back then, or maybe I used the later release of 16.10? Anyway, the quality of Ubuntu is usually pretty high, as it’s based on Debian, so I’m not sure why you are seeing this dependency problem with the missing package. I also can’t remember whether dvgrab was part of the standard Ubuntu sources, or whether it came from some partner site.

You could try to install a later release of Ubuntu, like Bionic which is the latest LTS release (18.04). This does contain the dvgrab package: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/bionic/+package/dvgrab

Not sure why you had the formatting problem. I can only guess it was some issue with inappropriate partitioning of your drive, so you probably had to repartition it and then format. Installing another Ubuntu release should be painless now. Just make sure you do not try to upgrade, but install from scratch (not sure whether upgrading is even an option, I don’t know Ubuntu well, as I seldomly use Linux on a desktop, but I’m a server guy).

Make sure to run sudo apt-get update before you try to install the package, to update the package sources. If you then run sudo apt-get install dvgrab it should pull in all dependencies automagically.

If you have trouble installing Ubuntu or the packages, maybe you can ask a friend or neighbor for help?

Good luck, I hope in the end you will succeed and save your precious video material.

And stay safe and sound!

I know you posted this like 3 years ago but was bored at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Purchased a FireWire (IEEE 1394) PCI card with the VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 chipset (it came with an included FireWire cable) from Amazon and I hooked it up to an old Sony DSR-11 DVCAM/MiniDV deck. Installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 19.10 on the old computer and followed your instructions and within seconds I was imported my old videos. It worked so easily that I felt I should have done some additional configuration of some sort. I probably would have added the “-showstatus” to your command line to make sure those longer tapes were actually importing. Thanks for posting.

Hi Karl.

I’m really surprised how helpful this article seems to be. Many thanks for letting me know about your success.

I’ll update the article with your suggestion, it sounds like a good idea.

Enjoy saving your old material, and stay safe and sound.

Best regards (to Sweden?),

Ralf

Only Ubuntu 10.04 recognized correctly my firewire card. I think that the is 19 years old. 🙂 I had to edit repository source file for Ubuntu.
Well at the final, it works! Thanks Ralf!

Thank you for posting this! I’m also importing all of my old home movies during COVID and your post made this super easy. The tapes and my MiniDV camera are almost 20 years old and haven’t been touched in over a decade. Pulled it all out of a box and it’s working great, no tape degradation at all. I’m excited to have more permanent copies on my server. Thank you again.

I’m glad to hear that this post is helping so many people. Really happy to hear you could import your old video footage… It seems MiniDV engineers really did a great job designing the system, if it’s still working well after such a long time… Enjoy!

I gave away my Firewire PCIe card a while back and then realized I still wanted to read in the tapes I had. I ordered a cheap card & cable and plugged it in. /dev/fw0 showed up with zero fiddling. Everything Worked great with Fedora 32 … all I had to do was install dvgrab. I was restoring tapes within 10 minutes. The hardest part was finding where I had put the tapes Figuring out that dvgrab existed was the key for me. THANKS!

Just want to say this is a great post and I am now using it for making a digital copy of my minidv’s as well. thank you very much!!

Something to keep in mind is that dvgrab with –autosplit __will__ overwrite files as it extracts if they contain the same output filenames.
For example on my camcorder there are a bunch of videos that have the exact same timestamp, as the camera’s internal clock seems to have reached an internal limit, so each time dvgrab wrote out a video file, it overwrote the last file (using –autosplit & –timestamp).
I ended up just not using the autosplit function when capturing my tapes.

Thanks for your comment. The behavior of your cam seems to be a corner case, but still your advice may be helpful for people whose cam behaves in a similar way, so thank you for responding here.

Hi Ralf,

Months later, and the comments section is still going strong!

My comment got longer that I intended, with three points:

1) I got the same symptoms as Aaaa mentioned a year ago: files don’t get split. It happened using Kino as well as dvgrab. I still hoped to get split files. Searching a cause / solution led me to your blog.

What solved it in my case, was not only using `-timestamp`, but also `-timecode`. My camera (some Sharp model) outputs ‘date’ with -timestamp, but adds the actual timestamp when adding -timecode.

After that, files got split as they should.

2) I have another problem that is not solved yet, perhaps you or a reader can speculate on the cause: using a 4-pin-to-4-pin cable from camcorder to laptop does not let Linux see the firewire-device. I got a new cable but no luck.

Running a 4-pin-to-6-pin cable from the camcorder to PCIe-card _does_ let Linux see the firewire-device, so I have a workaround, but I got more laptops with 4-pin firewire than I have on regular PC’s.

3) For other readers: my systems run relatively recent Debian versions, so don’t worry about dvgrab or Kino availability on a modern system.

That’s it 🙂 Thanks for your post and for the comment section!

Thanks very much for sharing your experience. As you correctly mention, this post is still going strong, I guess it must be one of my most popular posts here on my blog…😁

To be honest it’s way too long ago since I was regularly fiddling with FireWire devices, so I can’t remember whether there was any substantial design difference between 4-pin and 6-pin connections. I could most likely google it, but I’m too lazy at the moment…😉

Remember that you might be able to use a “PC Card” (or even PCMCIA?) on your laptop to add a 6-pin FireWire port, would that be an option? Also, I’m wondering how often you are grabbing MiniDV material? I would naively assume that you have just a limited number of tapes, and once those have been grabbed, you should be done, right? So does it really matter if you have to “resort” to using a PC?

Groetjes!

Thanks for posting such a simple, and to-the-point guide Ralf! Still very helpful, 5 years on!

Thanks for your blog. It helped get me started on trying to use my Ubuntu machine for capturing the data stream from a bunch of tapes I had made by capturing to Digital 8 and MiniDV.

My Ubuntu didn’t have the dvgrab installed. I did a quick search and discovered that Kino includes dvgrab and a lot of other stuff. I did a quick install and was quickly rewarded with a GUI for Kino.

I slapped a tape into my machine, hit rewind, then capture. A video of the core family from about 30 years ago. Your blog was what pushed me to get started.

Thank you for the information.

Thank you, Martin. Comments like your are very rewarding, so I know I haven’t wasted my time writing this… 🙂

Also thank you for sharing the info about “Kino.” Maybe it helps other people?!

Enjoy restoring your old memories…

Great tip to use dvgrab. Just thought I’d clarify something you mentioned a while back “There is no converter from USB to Firewire, to the best of my knowledge”. Some Pinnacle MovieBox units had a builtin FireWire/USB bridge, so you could capture full DV data to a USB socket on your computer (I don’t know about HDV). It came with drivers for Windows only. I have one and it’s still working fine on Windows 11. Capture software seems to work just the same. They still appear on eBay occasionally but you have to be careful as there were several models and some didn’t have a FireWire port. There’s more detail about MovieBox on this page:

https://www.dvmp.co.uk/dv-capture-over-usb.htm

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