I'm interested in using my optura 600 as a webcam to capture live video. I've successfully connected the optura 600 to my vaio laptop (it runs gentoo linux) through the firewire port and captured and edited video using kino and dvgrab.

I'm new to camcorders in general and I want to use the optura 600 to capture and stream video. What mechanics are necessary to setup the 600 as a webcam? Do I need to remove the tape and card from the camera? Is there a setting in the menus I need to set? If someone can help, I'd appreciate it.

Grant

Well, I"m not too sure how many on this forum are interested in a Linux-only topic. I've had my optura 600 for a few months. Being a Linux user, I pretty much trashed the software that came with the camera.

Through trial and error, I've come up with a list of 4 killer apps if you own one of these things and run Linux. Dump the usb cable and buy an ieee 1394 firewire cable. In fact I recommend it, regardless of whether you run Linux or not. If you plan to do any serious video editing you'll be glad you have it.

The usb connection in Linux doesn't work at this time. The firewire connection does work. All the apps I list use firewire to interface with the camera. Below find the list:

dvgrab - utility to grab DV from camcorder into AVI files and a few other formats including raw and jpeg for photos on a memory card.

dvbackup - a command-line utility to backup any kind of data to a DV camcorder. A cool app that I've tested with the optura 600. I backed up my entire drive to a single tape.

kino - a non-linear video editor. It uses dvgrab to capture the video segments or you can capture them via the command-line and open the files in kino.

cinelerra - a full-featured video editor and really cool app for free.

All these apps are under development and continue to improve. Hopefully someone will find this information useful and more up to date than the one post I found on this site regarding Linux and video editing.

Grant

Well, I spoke to soon. I"m happy to report USB is working with the gphoto2 command-line client. That gives me hope that the GUI clients based off the same library do indeed work.

Grant