I hate Sony
Because vendor lock-in is the one thing I don't tolerate.
Now, the Sony DRM scandal was sufficient for me to say my "nyah" to their corporate politics, so when it came to choosing a cellphone, I picked Nokia 6233 instead of a Sony Ericsson model. (Although I admit, that phone is not without its flaws — it has DRM, can't play Vorbis audio, MPEG-4 video — I don't even mention Theora here, and its USB connector sometimes hangs my Ubuntu system. And it doesn't come with a USB cable. But who could have predicted that? At least it plays MP3s, comes with earpieces, and I can copy them to its memory card from my PC. Sometimes. When the system doesn't hang. Sigh.)
But if Nokia's USB support is bad (by the way, did I mention that it only supports USB 1.1 so the transfer is slow as heck?), Sony's is nonexistent.
I'm not even talking about Linux here. Windows bloody XP kriffin' Professional frellin' x64 Edition. My Sony DSC-V1 camera, which is "responsible" for half the photos posted here (and which works in Ubuntu out of the box), only works in PTP mode under that system — meaning it's slow, not treated like a disk, and the access is read-only. And in XP i386 edition, known as simply "XP" to those who don't know x64 Edition exists (which includes Sony), they require installation of custom USB drivers. By comparison, my parents' Panasonic camera, which they bought as a replacement, works under both "flavors" of Windows XP out of the box. Granted, it's a newer model; but Sony could at least release the x64 drivers on their website, which they didn't. I only found the needed drivers on planetamd64.com recently, after the situation became really pressing — they're unofficial, made by some hacker from the 32-bit ones.
But for the Sony DCR-TRV345E camcorder, the situation is essentially hopeless.
First, Digital8 cassettes seem to be extremely hard to find now. Why? Open standards, baby, yeah! It appears that Sony phased out their proprietary Digital8 standard (which is just one entry in a long list of Sony's attempts to establish their own hardware standards, which includes Betamax and Blu-Ray in opposition to VHS and HD-DVD) and switched to MiniDV. Good for Sony that it learned its lesson the hard way, but now we're stuck with a legacy cassette format. Really, I think I'll try buying a regular Video8 cassette and recording on that. If it doesn't work, so be it.
Second, there's the USB support issue as well. In the olden days™, when I thought Linux was an extremely complex, server-only system without a GUI, I had no problem with that — I just plugged it in, set Movie Maker to video capture mode, and captured — getting a WMV with horrendous quality and lots of dropped frames in the end. Not like I cared back then, though.
Now, having to deal with Ubuntu on one machine and XP x64 on another, I plugged the USB cable in and run Kino. Obviously, nothing worked. Having trudged through several Ubuntu support forums, I read that Linux has no support for Sony USB video capture, but not before trying the IEEE1394/FireWire guides involving manual creation of /dev nodes, which, obviously, didn't work. On the other computer, Windows didn't find the drivers, and remembering my DSC-V1 struggles, I gave up.
I went to one of the local computer shops (there are, like, seven — all of them along the same street or not far from it...) and bought a FireWire controller and cable for the Russian ruble equivalent of $12. The other, newer PC has a FireWire socket on the motherboard but mine doesn't, so I installed the one I bought... but what I needed was the cable anyway, since the camcorder obviously didn't come with one — despite having a FireWire socket (labeled "DV" for reasons that aren't quite clear to me).
When I installed the card and turned on the computer, I noticed that Ubuntu was booting extremely slowly. A recovery mode boot made it clear that the source of the problem was my old CNet PRO200 Ethernet card — I plugged the FireWire card right next to it. Okay. I disassembled the entire thing again and uninstalled the Ethernet card, since I have an RJ-45 socket on the motherboard anyway. Granted, now I can't NAT to the other computer using two Ethernet cards, but I don't need this for the time being anyway.
Voila — the FireWire interface worked out of the box, and I finally managed to capture the video in Kino. But it cost me a trip to the computer shop and back and lots of nerves.
I hate you, Sony. I'm never using your products again, except for those I already own.
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