[GRLUG] dvgrab problem

[Ben Rousch]

I just got a new Panasonic PV-GS80 MiniDV camcorder and am trying to capture
the DV for editing in Kino. I am able to view the video smoothly on the
camera's LCD and capture video over firewire, but it comes in at very poor
quality. I am running Gutsy on a 2GHz proc and 512MB of RAM so I don't think
insufficient resources are the problem. I am using firewire via a PCMCIA
add-on card.

When I capture with dvgrab, I get a lot of the following messages:
"dvgrab-008.avi": buffer underrun near: timecode 00:01:45.07 date
2007.10.3019:14:31
This error means that the frames could not be written fast enough.

This seems to indicate that my hard disk is too slow? It is a 160GB laptop
drive less than 6 months old.

There seemed to be problems with DMA not working for some hard disks back in
Feisty, and I see that DMA is not turned on for /dev/sda1. It also seems to
be impossible to turn DMA on. When I try sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/sda1 I get the
error:
/dev/sda1:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

I think I have all of the proper modules loaded for dv:
lsmod | grep 1394
video1394 19800 0
dv1394 20824 0
raw1394 31096 0
ohci1394 36528 2 video1394,dv1394
ieee1394 96312 4 video1394,dv1394,raw1394,ohci1394

I've reached the limits of my troubleshooting, so if anyone else has any
ideas I'd love to hear them.
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