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Is this a good Firewire card?

debianrocks
debianrocks Posts: 2
in I/O Devices

I'm thinking about getting this Firewire 400 controller card. It is a SYBA PCI to Firewire 1394a 3+1 ports controller card Model SD-NEC-4F - Retail version.

According to the numerous reviews, most people seem to be happy with it. However, there were some complaints.

Can you please tell me if this card:

1) does a good job at what it is supposed to do,

2) is easy to install in Debian?

Is there some other source where I can get this card... possibly in the Seattle metro area somewhere?

I very much dislike the privacy intrusion encountered from using Newegg.com. If you haven't noticed, on their login page, they have Akamai Technologies plus Google identifying you when you login to Newegg!

Comments

  • atreyu
    atreyu Posts: 216
    Is there some other source where I can get this card... possibly in the Seattle metro area somewhere?
    Amazon has it, apparently. Try searching pricegrabber.com, i use 'em all the time, to find the best $$ on hardware.

    I've never used that card (or any firewire card based on that chipset) so I can't speak to its usability.
  • debianrocks
    debianrocks Posts: 2
    I should have mentioned this in my first post...

    I am looking for any firewire controller card that is compatible with Debian. I was only asking about that particular card because the Newegg ad said it was Linux compatible.

    I want whatever card that works best for transferring DV from/to my Sony camera. My camera has 4 pin DV output. I mainly want something that has the most features, whatever that may be. I'm not sure if I want to spend extra to get a 800 card yet, since I don't have anything that uses that.

    I have never used firewire before, so I am not really sure what firewire card would be best to get. The computer I am using only has PCI slots.

    Also, what would you recommend for a DV editor? I installed Kdenlive and Kino but haven't spent much time using either one of them yet.

    I was also wondering if there was a way to connect two cameras to the firewire and do linear editing between the two cameras while using software to control them? I was digging through Wikipedia's sections about DV, but didn't notice anything describing that. I am about as green as it gets concerning DV editing and using cameras with firewire, so I really don't know much about what is possible to do with it.

    I was wanting to try Cinnelara but can't seem to get that to install for anything. I know Cinnelara is for high-end editing, but I would really like to check it out sometime. I downloaded several iso files for live distros that supposedly included it, but it has been missing from the ones I tried so far. Would you happen to know which live distro media actually does include Cinnelara?
  • atreyu
    atreyu Posts: 216
    Ah, well then check out this website

    What really matters is the chipset that the Firewire card is using. Determine what that is (by looking up the hardware specs of the card), then look for that in the list at the above website. I have used the Lacie cards with great success.

    I used the 800/1394b variety b/c throughput mattered very much for the application. Keep in mind that you need hard drives that can keep up with that speed, or it is wasted band-width (unless you're doing it all in memory).

    I've never done video editing in Linux, so I'm no help there...

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