Using DV camera with SuSE 9.2
 

According to the manual it should be very easy. Plugin your camera, install gtkam and everything should be fine. As usual in reality it is much more complicated. I should admit that in WIndoz it was fine apart from the fact that I spent few hours looking for the driver for my JVC GR-DVL355 for XP. The CD I have with the camera comtained only Win98 drivers. But as soon as I installed the driver, I had it in My Computer.

In Linux the story is a bit different. When I pluged in the camera using USB port and swithced it on, nothing happened. I am not sure about details, but I thing I rebooted the PC and then clicked on suseplugger where I found the camera under Disk section as JVC DV Camera, which was very nice.

OK, I tried to configure it, clicking on an appropriate button, but had YaST Expert Partitioner. I had no idea what to do with it. So I quit it.

Then I read somewhere that I have to have gtkam, and I installed it. After running gtkam &, I had the programme frozen, so I closed it, tried again, had no luck either and rebooted.

Well, when KDE was loaded I had two gtkams running and a nice icon in My Computer called something like USB drive or camera. Clicking on it I had
After several attempts I switched the camera off and the icon as well as folder in /media disappeared for good. Neither switching on the camera, nor running gtkam, nor even rebood did not help. I lost it. I still have JVC DL Camera in suseplugger and gtkam no longer hangs on start up, but stil I cannot get the camera mounted saving I cannot access the pictures on memory card.

Can anyone help me with it?

Try kino
 

Did you try kino ( Kino Home Page). Looks promising. But I haven't tried yet. Search for Kino in YaST and install it.

Hope it helps.

Does your camcorder have a firewire port and/or firewire cable? This would work much better than a usb cable for video. If you download Kino from http://packman.links2linux.org (version 0.7.5 for suse 9.2), install with YaST, you could use the firewire connection. Then go to www.linuxjournal.com/article/7615 for instructions on how to configure Kino for video input and output via firewire. I use Kino a lot, it's great, but it was a little tricky to install the dv titler plug in for making titles. If all you have is usb, I think you're going to have a hard time finding a way load and edit what you shoot. I only use usb for my printer and my digital still camera. Hope this helps!

wel, actually I am using USB, because I do not have a firewire port in my PC. I want to d/l still pictures from a memory card rather than capture video.

same problem here. I also have USB and can't get it to work. I though would like to capture video, rather than stills. Right now I use a friend's Windows XP box in order to catch video from my DV, but that can't of course be the final solution.

this is from dmesg:
The icon in My Computer called USB Hard Disc (/dev/sda1) is Unmounted Hard Disk Partition. Why is it 'unmounted'? I tried to mount it using
but got


Any help? Please...

What is the output from the following commands

fdisk -l
cat /proc/scsi/scsi

Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "

Okay it is seen try this mount command. I missed something in an above post.
Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "

Is there any /dev/sd* or /dev/sg* devices. ' ls /dev/sd* ' ' ls /dev/sg* '

very many /dev/sd* and 16 /dev/sg*

try this mount
Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "

it still says mount: /dev/sg0 is not a block device :(

What does the command ' lsmod ' say.

Brian1