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Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi

117 points by jandeboevrie

by mysteria

2 subcomments

I archived all my MiniDV tapes using a cheap firewire card and dvgrab on Linux, it can be set to automatically split noncontinous clips into different files for easy viewing. It's very straightforward to use and can be done unattended.

by MomsAVoxell

4 subcomments

This is an awesome project.
I have a long-in-the-tooth investment in Fireware audio devices (Presonus) in my studio - 19” rack interfaces with 10 I/O’s, as well as the StudioMix mixer with 20 or so .. I’ve been keeping an aging iMac around to use all of this with and it still just plain works, but having the option to replace it with an rPi is really appealing. The system is mostly used for tracking, so having REAPER on the rPi, connected to all that FireWire gear, just seems such a nice idea…
I wonder what the load will be like, though? Can the latest rPi with PCI hat and Firwire interface handle 40 channels of audio over FireWire, I wonder? I know the issue would mostly be SD-card write speeds and so on .. maybe this disqualifies the rPi - but certainly there are other ARM-based SBC’s that this same technique could be applied to ..

by Aurornis

5 subcomments

Delightful that this still works. It would be interesting to go through the kernel tree and see how much maintenance goes into Firewire related code. Other than pulling data off of old devices, I wonder how many people are out there still using Firewire.

by bsimpson

2 subcomments

by 1vuio0pswjnm7

0 subcomment

Have similar needs. Found an old OWC Mercury Elite HDD that uses FireWire but no longer have old Mac G4
If the job is a one-time transfer to get files from old media to new media, is there any reason not to use an old Linux kernel on (non-RPi) compatible hardware that had IEEE 1394 enabled by default instead of compiling a new kernel for RPi with IEEE 1394 enabled

by MisterTea

0 subcomment

by haxtormoogle

0 subcomment

by jasomill

1 subcomments

It's times like these when my bag of at least one of nearly every dongle Apple has ever made comes in handy (FW800 ↔ TB2 + TB2 ↔ TB3 in this case).

by jerbearito

0 subcomment

Nice setup. I keep a FireWire card in my PC for digitizing VHS tapes using a Canon HV20 and a VCR. I need to sit down and finish the project (and sooner than later with VHS media breaking down).
> Linux will likely drop support for IEEE 1394 in 2029
Good to know!