Using Your Camcorder as a Webcam Part II ( Using a FireWire Connection)

The most common feature among Mini DV cameras is the port which you use to attach to your computer, known as a DV port (digital video) and by many other names, such as "I. Link", "FireWire" and "IEEE1394", all referring to the same technology. When you connect your camcorder to your computer, you are using this FireWire connection to stream the video and audio signals onto your hard drive. This is done by use of a Windows technology known as WDM ("Windows Driver Model"). WDM is a relatively new system meant to replace VFW ("Video for Windows"), the previous standard for importing and converting video from one source to the computer.

Unfortunately, most webcams and webcam programs need VFW to work, and FireWire uses WDM, not VFW. Windows has in its programming a facility to translate a VFW program to output WDM, but not vice versa, so when you start your webcam program, it will not recognize your miniDV camcorder, connected by FireWire.

So how can you make it work? Get an analog video capture card, examples are Matrox eTV G450, or an ATI Radeon with video capture, or Hauppage WinTV. All these cards are using VFW device to capture video and should be recognized in webcam software. Always remember that this analog video capture cards are not allowed to be advised to the customer however just remind them to look for an Analog Video Capture Card so that they can use FireWire Connection.