Building a Media Center System - Building the Perfect PC - page 258

CamcorderCapture
Kino (Ubuntu repositories)

Transferring your camcorder video to the media center system may be as sim-
ple as connecting the camcorder to a USB port. If the camcorder is a USB mass
storage device, Linux pops up a File Browser window that lists the video files
on the camcorder. From there, just copy the files to the video directory on your
hard drive. If your camcorder captures video to an optical disc, insert the disc
into the optical drive and copy the files from File Browser to your hard drive.

If your DV camcorder uses the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) interface, you'll need a sep-
arate program to transfer your video files. The best one we've found is Kino,
shown in Figure 6-77. That's Robert in our home lab, shooting an intro seg-
ment for one of his YouTube Home Scientist videos ( http://www.youtube.com/
user/TheHomeScientist ).

FireWire if You Need It
The Intel DH55TC motherboard does
not provide a FireWire interface. We
captured that screen on Robert's
main system, where he does all the
video transfers and heavy lifting. If
you want FireWire support on your
media center system, choose an
ASUS, GIGABYTE, or Intel mother-
board that provides it, or simply
install an inexpensive FireWire
adapter card.

Figure 6-77. Kino capturing video footage from our DV camcorder

Kino requires FireWire support, which is not installed in Ubuntu by default.
To install Kino and FireWire support, from the Ubuntu main menu choose
System → Administration → Synaptic Package Manager. Search for “raw1394”.
When the list of packages that contain that string appears, mark the checkbox
for the libraw1394 library item and select it for installation. Then search for
“Kino” and mark it for installation. Click the Apply button to install Kino and
1394 support. When the packages are installed, close Synaptic.

You may encounter the same problem we do with 1394 support. If you run
Kino and attempt to capture DV footage, it may tell you that the file /dev/
raw1394 is not available. The problem is that accessing that file requires root
access. You can fix that problem as follows: