Simple solutions to capture DV under MacOS

I was looking for simple (and cheap) solution to copy my DV tapes on my hard disk. Here is what I found :

• Vidi : free
• AVCVideoCap : GUI, included by Apple in the Firewire SDK, that can be downloaded here
• Live Capture Plus : commercial, about €49
• iMovie, commercial

iMovie doesn’t support the use case I am interested in, ie. just save one big .dv file. Live Capture Plus is too expensive for this purpose.

I was until now pretty happy with AVCVideoCap, until it recently decided not to capture anything anymore. After selecting an output file name, it says “File opened”, and if I try to capture, “Could not open device”, although iMovie and Vidi didn’t have any problem with the same hardware/software setup.

So I had to find another solution, and I came upon Vidi, which is now the tool I use. It can do much more than what I need, but it’s free and even provided with the source code.

See also :

• http://bellican.net/blog/?p=9
• dvsplit, a tool to split the raw dv files based on the timestamps

Keywords: rip capture dv raw camcorder video movie mac macos

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Filed under: Video, camcorder, capture, dv, mac, macos, movie, raw, rip, Video