Digital Video Converter

I also required an analogue video to digital video converter as the camera outputs a standard analogue video signal. For this I chose a Canopus ADVC-55 DV Converter (http://www.grassvalley.com/products/advc55). The ADVC-55 plugs into the FireWire (IEEE 1394a) port of the PC and is self powered when using a 6-Pin FireWire cable. Windows should pick it up as a DV device.

FireWire Problems

As expected, no installation involving a PC ever goes smoothly and this one was no exception. The built in FireWire ports on my Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 (rev 2.0) motherboard just would not detect the ADVC-55 DV Converter.

I tried all available FireWire drivers, from the legacy Windows drivers to the latest Windows FireWire drivers and no luck. Gigabyte didn’t seem to have any FireWire drivers to download for this board so they were no help. In the end I had to install an old PCI Sound Blaster Audigy card that just happened to have a FireWire port on it. Bingo – it worked straight away!

I wonder if others have problems with FireWire and Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 (rev 2.0) motherboards, it was just lucky that I could work around the problem relatively easily. One day there might be an update and I can use the native FireWire ports and remove the Audigy card, but it isn’t really an issue so will run with it for the moment.

All Working

Once I had it running I used Windows Live Movie Maker to test the video signal. Everything was OK so the system was ready for an initial test.

Canopus ADVC-55 DV Converter sitting on top 

on my Meteor Hunting PC.