We have been working over the weekend to start the conversion of the studio across to Kdenlive. Our previous model, don't laugh, used a canopus capture card so we are now looking at a capture method that will work with 'kden'. If anyone has any advice or tips then we would appreciate the feedback.

You can grab the video with KINO.

Plugin the camera via firewire and write this code in your terminal:

sudo chmod g+rw /dev/raw1394

then open KINO

It will work...i hope ;)

hi,

kdenlive already has build in capture support via the capture monitor...

@Creator:
On Ubuntu, users aren't part of the "video" group by default. Have you made sure that the user you're logged in as actually is a member of "video"? Otherwise the user doesn't have permission to use /dev/raw1394 and can't capture from firewire, no matter which application is used.

@Creator:
First off: Don't ever run any application as complex as Kdenlive with sudo if you don't have to. You don't want your Ubuntu to pull the Windows XP on you.

Now, you seem to have two problems:

1) The permissions for /dev/raw1394 are too restrictive. rw-rw---- is only half of it. I guess it's owned by 'root', group 'root'. Why? Because the udev.rules don't say otherwise. Try to add

KERNEL=="raw1394[0-9]*", NAME="raw1394/%n", GROUP="video"

Somewhere in the udev rules file. Then try again, but NOT (!!) with sudo. Be an ordinary user.
If this still doesn't change anything, try

sudo chmod 666 /dev/raw1394

(That's right, the number of the beast)

Then run Kdenlive/dvgrab as ordinary user. Any improvement? If so: great. But -

2) Something in your computer setup seems to be too slow for DV capturing. What are the specs of your machine? RAM? Harddrive? CPU? Do you use disk encryption?

Whilst this does fix the problem it is not a permanent fix in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic), not sure about earlier versions.

Adding the user to video group, adding KERNEL=="raw1394[0-9]*", NAME="raw1394/%n", GROUP="video" to /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules, rebooting and then changing permissions for /dev/raw1394 had the desired effect. Dvgrab would then work without sudo and capture in kdenlive also worked.

There is a HOWEVER!

/dev/raw1394 is created on the fly i.e. it only exists when an firewire device is plugged in and switched on. On rebooting the computer, the file is deleted and again created when a firewire device is detected. So changing the permissions of the file to 666 only works for that session.

The fix is actually to follow the Ubuntu community Firewire documentation https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Firewire which explains the problem and to apply the Method 3. 'udev rule' fix which allows dvgrab to work without sudo level access and removes the need to change permissions on /dev/raw1394.

Furthermore, this fix also removes the need to make changes to /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules.

So just to clarify matters, to get dvgrab to work from terminal without sudo permissions, and therefore work in kdenlive, you need to do the following:

1. Add the user to the video group. From terminal you would enter:

useradd -G video username

2. Run the commands documented in the Ubuntu community firewire documentation as referenced above, which for completeness are:

a. from terminal enter:

echo 'KERNEL=="raw1394", GROUP="video"' > /tmp/raw1394.rules

b. then enter:

sudo cp /tmp/raw1394.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

c. then to tidy up, enter:

rm /tmp/raw1394.rules

d. reboot PC.

Finally, I think the kdenlive FAQ documentation on Firewire needs updating, as this does not work in Ubuntu 9.10.