Transfering Video from Sony DCR-TRV250 by USB on Win7 64-bit

[madadivad]

Hi, All;

I have Windows 7 64-bit and a Sony DCR-TRV250. I was going to try to use FireWire to transfer the video, but after looking at 10 different electronics stores to no avail and being too impatient to wait for a firewire cable to ship, I decided to try to connect via USB. I downloaded the driver for XP and can now see in my devices and printers that it shows up as "USB Composite Device" listed under "Unspecified". Now, I can't find it as an available device in any of my video capture programs (Premier Pro, Debut, etc.). Does anyone have any ideas of how to fit this square peg into a round hole?

Thanks,
Adam

[Brad]

Thank you for including the model number. You may be able to transfer video with this camcorder by USB, but Sony says it won't work with your operating system. Your camcorder was designed to work with Windows XP 32-bit.

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/news-item.pl?news_id=128&mdl=DCRTRV250

(1) "The USB streaming feature is not supported with 64-bit Windows Vista operating systems."
(2) Confusingly, your camcorder is listed as "Not Applicable" in the USB chart even though the manual indicates it can do "USB Streaming".

[aedipuss]

the streaming feature would only get you low quality 320x240 anyway, not the 720x480 DVavi that's sent over firewire.

[jman98]

You're not supposed to be able to install 32 bit drivers on 64 bit Windows so I am amazed that you didn't get some kind of horrific error message when trying to install it. Or maybe you did but did not understand what it was saying. Yet another reason to hate Sony I guess. There's some evidence on the link that vaporeon800 provided that 64 bit Vista MAY be supported enough to make it work and that MAY mean that you can get any 64 bit Vista drivers working in Win 7 64 bit, but you'll just have to try and see what happens. It definitely doesn't seem that Sony is very interested in keeping software updated for this camcorder, but that's kind of typical of Sony. I'm not completely anti-Sony but I am very selective about what I buy from them. If you bought Windows 7 Ultimate then you can get a free XP virtual machine from Microsoft. The XP VM is 32 bit and it may be possible to get any XP drivers for your camcorder working in it. It's kind of a kludge but if you've got the time to try it there is a chance it will work.

If you need cables, I recommend buying cheap ones from Newegg.com if you can possibly be patient. You can often save $20 or maybe more by buying from Newegg and honestly their cheaper cables really aren't inferior to the overpriced ones Best Buy, etc., sell in their stores.

[madadivad]

Okay...so it seems that if I really want the best quality and don't want write my own drivers, I had better just stick to using the FireWire option. Now, I know that USB and FireWire are officially incompatible, but I do happen to have some connectors that can get me from male 4-pin FireWire to male USB. Is there any way to workaround the incompatibility or is the incompatibility absolute?

[edDV]

Okay...so it seems that if I really want the best quality and don't want write my own drivers, I had better just stick to using the FireWire option. Now, I know that USB and FireWire are officially incompatible, but I do happen to have some connectors that can get me from male 4-pin FireWire to male USB. Is there any way to workaround the incompatibility or is the incompatibility absolute?

No there is no Firewire to USB adapter for camcorder capture. There are some Windows Firewire networking to Ethernet adapters but those don't apply to DV streaming.

Capture to Firewire using WinDV or DVIO.

Is there any way to workaround the incompatibility or is the incompatibility absolute?

Microsoft presented a framework for IEEE-1394 and USB2 interoperability at WinHEC 2004 but it was never implemented in Windows. It was left more of less as a guide for proprietary driver writers. Panasonic made a few consumer MiniDV cameras with DV streaming over USB2 to proprietary Panasonic drivers/applications. I'm near certain they never did 64 bit drivers.

That was it. I've never seen anything similar in Linux. Panasonic didn't even implement this for their pro cams. So, yes Panasonic proved you can write a driver that will work. Good luck.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=microsoft%20developer%20dv%20usb%20compatibilit...DJ7UrQ&cad=rja

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg566938
skip down to "USB and 1394 archives" and "Video Capture Archives".