Severe problem with DV cams hooked up to my PC

Sticky Fingaz wrote on 9/3/2004, 1:05 PM

For the past few weeks I have been having a very severe problem. Whenever I hook up a DV camera to my computer so I can capture it, no matter what program I use, it almost always locks up.

For example, let's say I load Vegas 4 or 5 and go to the capture mode. Then I turn my camera on. The capture program hangs, and will be totally frozen. Doesn't even matter if I keep waiting for an hour, it hangs. THE SECOND I unplug the camera, or turn it off, the program no longer hangs. This has been the case with Vegas, DVVCR, Ulead DVD Workshop, Studio 8 and 9, it doesn't matter.

Also, this happens with both a Sony VX2000, and a brand new Sony DSR-250. Doesn't matter which, so I am assuming this is not a camera problem.

The motherboard is an Abit IS7 and the OS is Windows XP. The firewire card is onboard, and it's a Texas Instruments (all it tells me in hardware properties).

If anyone can shed some light on this I'd really appreciate it.

Comments

Flack wrote on 9/3/2004, 2:28 PM

First thing I would do is upgrade to the latest drivers for the mother board, then I would try a pci firewire card and disable the onboard one. This will at least test the onboard port.

Flack

musicvid10 wrote on 9/4/2004, 12:14 AM

The first thing I would do is remove the onboard firewire in Device Mangler, restart the computer and let it find it again.

jogga wrote on 9/4/2004, 5:14 AM

Go to Abit's webpages and see if there is a BIOS upgrade as well. I have had lots of problems with my old ABit KT7 mainboard. A BIOS upgrade improved my problems.

farss wrote on 9/4/2004, 6:58 AM

Do you have any other firewire devices?
Also try having the firewire devices on whne you start the PC or at least Vidcap.

Bob.

KPITRL wrote on 9/4/2004, 7:42 AM

I once had a similar problem, and after trying several posibilities, I narrowed it down to the firewire cable.

Hope your case is as simple as mine was,

kpitrl

johnmeyer wrote on 9/4/2004, 9:07 AM

The Firewire cable is a good guess. Is it unusually long? Try replacing it.

Another problem is the Firewire drivers in Windows XP. They have problems recognizing new devices. I had the same issue as you: A computer that never had problems suddenly having problems recognizing the camera. I traced this back to the time when I started using external Firewire drives. For the first time, Windows has to "enumerate" the devices on the 1394 channel. I found that there is a Windows patch that fixes this. See this link for a description, along with links to the Microsoft KB article that describes the problem. This patch seems to solve other problems as well:

Firewire 1394 Solutions

Finally, I have read elsewhere that the SP2 patch for XP also fixes all sorts of Firewire/1394 problems. I haven't upgraded myself, so I can't give you any first-hand results.