Video cameras and Linux Redux – Canon MV920

Last weekend, I purchased a video camera. I bought it about five minutes before attending a wedding (that I was shooting photographs for – the couple are very close friends of mine), and the sales lady herself was amazed at our “last minuteness”. In all fairness, I was only told that they weren’t having any video for their wedding about an hour before the wedding, so I needed some time to do some Google research.

I purchased a Canon MV920 Mini DV video camera. Its cheap (even cheaper now that there’s a $75 rebate that I just found out about), has support for an external microphone, uses the same batteries that I use for my DSLR, and its really small and light. My deal was sweetened with free DV tapes thrown in, as well as a Firewire cable (6-pin; I use the 4-pin iPod converter when connecting to my Thinkpad).

I’m pleased to announce that it “just works” with Linux. Just install dvgrab (its in Core – yum install dvgrab), and simply run dvgrab on the command line. A little while later, stop it, and open up the file which plays nicely in Totem. 200MB for about 1 minute of video.

As its December, and I plan on quite a bit of travel, I guess it only makes sense that I’ll be using more of the video camera, and writing about how funky Linux is with it :-)

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2 Comments

  1. Donna says:

    Cool! – so you can also do some filming of melbourne for our video for Sydney.
    And – how are you with Linux Video editing tools? ;)

  2. Donna says:

    Cool! – so you can also do some filming of melbourne for our video for Sydney.
    And – how are you with Linux Video editing tools? ;)


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