Copying video from the JVC GR-D850AA using firewire on Linux

It seems that our JVC GR-D850A works on Vista, but not on Windows 7, so I thought this might be something that Linux could solve for me.

I started up Kino on my Linux Mint Debian Edition partition, and was able to fast forward and rewind the tape, but I only saw a black screen when playing. CLI application dvgrab to the rescue.

To copy the video and split into timestamped files, I ran this command:

dvgrab -buffers 1000 -rewind -autosplit -format avi -timestamp video

I needed the buffering because I was streaming over a network.

Note that dv1 format seems to crash mplayer. Another useful command is this, which streams the video directly into mplayer:

dvgrab - | mplayer -

To control the tape, you can use the dvcont command:

dvcont stop
dvcont rewind
dvcont status

Using mencoder and find, the following command will convert a folder of AVI files into XVID format, saving them into a subdirectory called small:

find . -name "*.avi" -type f -exec mencoder {} -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts fixed_quant=3 -o small/{} \;