[Orbitalzone]

I put Win7 on my desktop a year ago (was XP) and the other day tried the firewire card for the first time in years and notice it won't work correctly with my DV camcorder.

Now googling firewire problems win7 produces many many hits with people suffering the same problem of camcorders no longer being correctly identified or being unable to capture DV video.

Has anyone here had firewire issues with Win7 and resolved them?

I've got no ! issues showing in device manager, the JVC cam shows as an imaging device there too, it's just that when capturing video nothing comes through even though I can control the DV cam via Win7 control.

I've tried different firewire drivers and legacy driver without luck, 2 firewire cards, several firewire cables, different capture software. All hardware shows as working but capture always fails.

At this rate I'll get an old XP machine working just so I can capture some DV tapes.

[cuffcake]

I had exactly the same problem a few weeks ago. I also borrowed a USB capture device from a work colleague, but it didn't work.
I could only control the camera with FF,REW, STOP etc. It was also a JVC mini-DV machine. I ended up using an XP computer
of the brother-in-law's which worked flawlessly.

Hope you get your footage transferred.

[Loobster]

Alright matey, is it an on-board firewire card or an add-in one?

I wonder if the issues are related to certain types or brands of devices and Windows 7, since the firewire interface itself appears to be recognised by the system ok.

I've only tried mine a few times but had no issue capturing via firewire on 7.

[Orbitalzone]

Hi there,

It's a Dell desktop that came with pci firewire card and I've also tried a Pinnacle pci card - both give the exact same problem- firewire card dectected in Dev manager, JVC GRD50 dv camcorder detected as an imaging device in dev manager. I can control the camcorder via any capture program I try but no actual footage is captured.

Googling shows many people suffering and some solving by using a legacy firewire driver built into W7 but this won't work on mine.

I think I'll cobble together an XP machine to get my DV capture then edit on the newer W7 machine.

I even found the same issue (oddly) on my work laptop which is a new HP Probook with built in firewire BUT has WinXP sp3 on it, so wonder if some update common to XP-Vista-W7 may have crippled some firewire capturing.

[Orbitalzone]

update

for anyone interested and for future Google searchers - I tried various things including dual booting Vista - W7 and XP - W7 on my Dell Vostro 200 desktop and found my problem still persisted on either firewire card (a Dell firewire card and Pinnacle 'booster 2' firewire card) although on occasions if I booted the PC with DV cam connected and running I could capture DV video albeit it might stop again.

I tried Vista as that was what was originally supplied with the desktop and hoped a default non SP1 installation might get it to 'out the box' condition. It didn't make much odds so wondered if my Dell firewire card had gone a bit faulty.

So, finally I gave one more try, refitted the Pinnacle firewire pci card and booted up Win7 64bit and it works perfectly every time (so far!) and that's using the default Win7 driver rather than the legacy driver that some find works for them.

So I never really found what was happening, it seems my Dell supplied firewire card may have gone a bit tempermental and perhaps swapping cards and drivers finally got a combination to work.

Utlimately it seems firewire is a technology that MS don't want to support much these days and so perhaps users might consider this if buying a new PC or upgrading. It might be worth keeping an old XP machine around for reliable DV capture until you move to another DV camera format.