Ideal length of Firewire cable

[NitinGoyal]

Hello

What should be the length of the firewire cable to capture from MicroMV and DV camcorder. Does longer cables result in loss of quality or it does't matter whatever the length is. I am planning to buy a 14' Belkin firewire cable.

Cheers
Nitin

[guns1inger]

Mine is about 1 metre (33 inches). I would suggest that 2 metres is probably about as far as you want to go, but I nothing to back that up.

[MpegEncoder]

It shouldn't matter. It's not analog, it's digital. It will either work or not. Analog and digital are very different. Long analog cable will introduce subtle noise, whereas a long digital cable will produce clearcut failure if noise is introduced.

[bobcat56458]

The maximum length a firewire cable should be is 4.5 meters (14.8ft). There is one manufacture that makes longer cables that work, I have one of there "Firewire 400" 10 meter cables (32.8ft) that I purchased on line from TheNerds.net for $32.70 + shipping a while back. Unibrain's website states; "Unibrain firewire cables do not only achieve a very controlled 110 Ohm impedance but also provide high performance for skew, attenuation and crosstalk. These latest features were not prerequisites when the first IEEE-1394/1395 specification was issued, at the time limiting the maximum cable length to 4.5 meters. Therefore we can now secure safe operation of our Firewire cable lengths up to 10 meters!". They also make a 20 meter firewire cable that is to be used for DV camcorders only.

[ofbarea]

I have networked a couple of PC’s using 3 separated cables and two firewire repeaters. The final cable length was over 12 meters.

I used a couple of these: http://www.orangemicro.com/repeater.html

[daamon]

Cross-continent communications are mostly digital, so I don't think (as long as it's digitial) that a PC cable of a few metres will be a problem.

Yes, I know they're fibre-optics but either way 0s and 1s are being sent and so, unless the medium is damaged, no info should be lost...

[TheUnknownComic]

I'd say some hardware will be more forgiving of impedances that vary from the standard. Cables that work on one setup might not work on another if they're out-of-spec. I'd say the biggie is if the cable is meeting the firewire specs.

[guns1inger]

all digital communication methods have finite limits. Fibre-optic, copper wire, wireless. Any signal travelling through any medium suffers some form of impedence, and therefore signal degredation. Therefore, any line of any distance required repeaters and amplifiers to keep boosting the signal to the next point, and ultimately to it's destination.