Extracting movies from Sony Camcorder

I guess it was three years since my brother Rajesh Bollapragada went to the US and was coming back to visit us all :) I was wondering what he was getting me :p and can I used it with my Linux box?

He got me a Sony DCR-TRV 350; we experimented a lot with it and then tried getting it out on to the pc to preserve the video on CD. We used the driver, and software that came with the camcorder. We tried extracting it out using the USB and that seemed to the only available link that we could establish with the PC. We could extract the video, but it was too bad on quality. The quality was not what we used to see when we connect the camcorder to the TV :( The USB streaming feature on the camcorder enables us to it as a web cam

Then a month or so latter, I came back the Hyderabad and we were on a trip to GOA. I was all geared up, a couple of us Ramana, Arvind, Mridhul, Ramesh by bus and Sailandhar, Sanjay, Kiran, Karthik and Kirthan by car

We landed in GOA enjoyed the whole stay on the gorgeous beaches randomly videoing the joy, then by the time we could realize we were back in Hyderabad

Then I visited the local computer market CTC, and got my self an IEEE1394 card commonly known as a FireWire card hooked it up to the PC, Linux could recognize it instantly. Now all I needed was the tools and the howto. I searched on google for FireWire and came to the URL http://www.linux1394.org, which has tones of information that I needed

I downloaded libraw1394 and dvgrab the ibrary. libraw1394 is the Linux kernel's IEEE 1394 subsystem provides access to the raw 1394 bus through the raw1394 module. dvgrab is the tool that helps you extract movies as AVI files on your Linux Box. I ran the entire necessary
./configure; make; make install; and make raw; (creates the /dev entries from where you can extract video). And then the necessary
./configure; make; make install; for dvgrab

To extract data from the camcorder plug it to the pc using the FireWire and then switch on the camcorder in VCR mode and then run

$>dvgrab baseFileName

dvgrav autosplits the files with the maximum size of 1024Gb or something like that, the maximum size that can fit on a dvd .vob file or some thing like that, I read this some place I don't remember. Some interesting features are that you can stop and start recording, skip, and rewind pause interactively with dvgrab

Look out for the file sizes thet are huge, One will have to use mencoder to compress them as required