Grab video from a DV camera with Kino

First, you need to make sure you have kino installed:

$ sudo apt-get install kino

then, connect your camera with the firewire cable and make sure the iee1394 module is loaded. Doing:

$ lsmod | grep ieee1394

should give you:

ieee1394              108288  4 dv1394,raw1394,sbp2,ohci1394

Now make sure the device /dev/raw1394 has been created. Doing:

$ ls -all /dev/raw1394

should give you something like:

crw-rw---- 1 root disk 171, 0 2009-06-10 09:56 /dev/raw1394

Also, make sure /dev/raw1394 belongs to either the disk or video groups. You will notice in the output above that my /dev/raw1394 belongs to the disk group, so it’s ok, but if this is not the case for you, then you can fix it by doing:

$ sudo chown root.disk /dev/raw1394

Finally, add yourself to the disk or video groups (whichever group you added the device to):

$sudo useradd -G [group-name] [user-name]

Now Kino should be able to recognize the camera and you should be able to transfer your videos to your computer!