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Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi
- bsimpson 7mo agoTIL Linux does eventually drop support for old hardware.
- crote 7mo agoIt's more about maintainability than age. Some ancient hardware which is still actively being used and which has plenty of maintainers willing to keep it up-to-date will stick around. A driver of only a few years old with roughly zero drivers, no maintainers, and which forms an obstacle for other work? That'll be gone very quickly.
- shasheene 7mo agoI'm still sad that Linux dropped support for i486 and early-i586 CPUs. And more disappointed that distributions especially Debian the "universal operating system" has dropped support for i586 already (and is dropping support for i686) Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft. I really love the idea of obsessive, perfectionism approach of providing indefinite hardware support to obscure old hardware (but especially once-popular old hardware), with adequate automated testing suites to test ancient hardware. Maybe with agentic AI coding we'll be able to expand support windows, and even bring back hardware support for older hardware.
- bsimpson 7mo agoReal question though: who's gonna run a CI farm of old hardware? That sounds not-cheap and commercially untenable.
- kelnos 7mo agoI imagine you don't need to; you can emulate i586 on x86_64, and it would probably be performant enough. But I suspect that's not really the hurdle: none of the existing Debian developers care enough about it to maintain it, and no one who cares about it enough about it is willing to maintain it.
- nullpoint420 7mo agoWouldn’t this be an unreliable CI though? I assume i586 and i686 cycle accurate emulators are hard to come by?
- password4321 7mo agoNetBSD?
- ndiddy 7mo agoNetBSD has the same problem that the major Linux distros do, it's just expressed differently. Instead of dropping support like the Linux distros do, they will keep cross-compiling for old and obscure platforms even if nobody cares enough about them to test them. Then major breakages will start to appear that make the ports unusable (crash on boot, no video, no keyboard input, etc) and they go unnoticed for years because these ports have no actual real-world users. The only benefit I can think of for the project being set up this way is that it makes some nostalgic Gen X'ers happy when they pull up the NetBSD site and go "oh I could run a supported OS on my 68k Mac/Next Cube/Windows CE handheld/whatever, that's neat" and then they go about the rest of their day without actually doing that.
- kelnos 7mo ago> Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft. Open source has a pressure that's often even more difficult to overcome: limited spare time from volunteer maintainers. Volunteers are usually drawn from the pool of users. There aren't many i586 users left, so the pool of volunteers is small enough that there's no one able or willing to maintain Debian for it. If you're that disappointed, step up to maintain the i586 port! If you're unable or unwilling to do so, then you have your answer, generalized across all i586 enthusiasts, as to why they dropped support.
- userbinator 7mo agoOpen-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft Look at who contributes to the Linux kernel. We'd never have "secure" boot or any of that hostile lockdown stuff if it wasn't tainted with commercial interests pushing their agenda.
- mschuster91 7mo ago> We'd never have "secure" boot or any of that hostile lockdown stuff if it wasn't tainted with commercial interests pushing their agenda. To be fair, there is value to be had in reasonably trustworthy cryptography and computing. As long as you can enroll your own certificates in the secure-boot trustchain, you can have a device where you can be reasonably certain that, even assuming an evil-maid attack, as long as your computer is powered down, it is protected against a wide, wide class of attacks. And for some people, that matters. Even in the US, greetings go out to ICE.
- mysteria 7mo agoI archived all my MiniDV tapes using a cheap firewire card and dvgrab on Linux, it can be set to automatically split noncontinous clips into different files for easy viewing. It's very straightforward to use and can be done unattended.
- geerlingguy 7mo agoJust thinking back 10 years ago when I was arching all my DV tapes on my Dad's old G5... I did it all by hand through Final Cut Express. It would've been sooo much easier had I known about dvgrab back then!
- mysteria 7mo agoI'd heard a few horror stories about people doing it on Windows and Mac, with bad compatibility and annoying software. With dvgrab it's super simple.
- arthurfm 7mo agoDVIO [0] and WinDV [1] would be the closest equivalents to dvgrab on Windows. Both are super easy to use (especially the former). For HD DV tapes there's also HDVSplit [2]. [0] https://www.videohelp.com/software/DVIO https://www.videohelp.com/software/DVIO [1] https://www.videohelp.com/software/WinDV https://www.videohelp.com/software/WinDV [2] https://www.videohelp.com/software/HDVSplit https://www.videohelp.com/software/HDVSplit
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoAlso ripped all my old MiniDV tapes a decade ago or so. (I don't remember it being tedious.) (I recall about 12GB for each 60min tape, FWIW.) I've known for some time now not to trust media formats to remain easy to access as time goes on. Floppy disks, ZIP disks, SCSI… So nice the home movies are now in the cloud (and on USB drives as additional backup).
- HoldOnAMinute 7mo agoFirewire support was removed from the Linux kernel so I had to switch to Mint Linux to accomplish the same thing
- Aurornis 7mo agoDelightful that this still works. It would be interesting to go through the kernel tree and see how much maintenance goes into Firewire related code. Other than pulling data off of old devices, I wonder how many people are out there still using Firewire.
- geerlingguy 7mo agoThere's still a thriving (albeit small) community of skateboarders, retro enthusiasts, and even some AV pros who have FireWire equipment in active use. In the kernel, the last commit in the IEEE 1394 area was a month or so ago—it's not 'active' maintenance, but its definitely being maintained, and is quite stable in my testing. (Thanks a ton to the current maintainer, who's going to go through the 3 year process of sunsetting full kernel support, and coordinating that with external projects!)
- argsnd 7mo agoThat’s actually pretty cool, I’m surprised there’s skateboarders that still use VX1000s or whatever instead of moving on to GoPros etc
- voidUpdate 7mo agoOlder cameras have a certain "look" that can be hard to manually reproduce. I've been considering getting an older digital (maybe DV) camcorder for exactly that reason, I find that "look" very charming, and it makes it look more like what I associate with a "home video"
- jonhohle 7mo agoWhy sunset it, though? There’s still floppy, atapi, and zip support. Every Apple device from the late 90s to 2012 had FireWire. Most Sony PCs from the late 90s to 2009. Google estimates that at over 100M systems with FireWire. There were 50M Zip drives, in comparison. I know I should probably move on, but I have a lot of FireWire block devices and video equipment. The disk/disc drives can be moved to USB, but the video equipment cannot.
- MomsAVoxell 7mo agoThis is an awesome project. I have a long-in-the-tooth investment in Fireware audio devices (Presonus) in my studio - 19” rack interfaces with 10 I/O’s, as well as the StudioMix mixer with 20 or so .. I’ve been keeping an aging iMac around to use all of this with and it still just plain works, but having the option to replace it with an rPi is really appealing. The system is mostly used for tracking, so having REAPER on the rPi, connected to all that FireWire gear, just seems such a nice idea… I wonder what the load will be like, though? Can the latest rPi with PCI hat and Firwire interface handle 40 channels of audio over FireWire, I wonder? I know the issue would mostly be SD-card write speeds and so on .. maybe this disqualifies the rPi - but certainly there are other ARM-based SBC’s that this same technique could be applied to ..
- dylan604 7mo agoOut of curiosity, what version of the OS is that iMac running? Using it as essentially dedicated piece of audio equipment instead of a daily driver would be fine by me. I've done it with the 2012 cheese grater MacPros running 10.6 for eternity essentially as a dedicated video capture device. It just happens to look like a computer, but it remains in use for one singular purpose. No more updates. No WAN access.
- MomsAVoxell 7mo agoIt’s an ancient iMac from 2011, so whatever is the last supported version from Apple .. it never gets updates. (Don’t have it handy at the moment to find the exact version, sorry..) Yeah, its just a dedicated DAW in the rig, used only for recording multiple tracks for later transfer to other modern machines for further work ..
- MomsAVoxell 7mo agoI looked it up, it’s 10.3. So, very, very long in the tooth - no longer supported, and even homebrew has given up on it. So it is essentially just an appliance for the purpose of streaming FireWire audio to disk for use on other systems .. and in that capacity it serves well. But I think I’d like to replace it with a raspberry Pi ..
- MisterTea 7mo agoPosted a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509902
- jerbearito 7mo agoNice setup. I keep a FireWire card in my PC for digitizing VHS tapes using a Canon HV20 and a VCR. I need to sit down and finish the project (and sooner than later with VHS media breaking down). > Linux will likely drop support for IEEE 1394 in 2029 Good to know!
- haxtormoogle 7mo agoUsb to firewire adapter cords do exist and work fine. they are about 5-15$
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo agoHave similar needs. Found an old OWC Mercury Elite HDD that uses FireWire but no longer have old Mac G4 If the job is a one-time transfer to get files from old media to new media, is there any reason not to use an old Linux kernel on (non-RPi) compatible hardware that had IEEE 1394 enabled by default instead of compiling a new kernel for RPi with IEEE 1394 enabled
- jasomill 7mo agoIt's times like these when my bag of at least one of nearly every dongle Apple has ever made comes in handy (FW800 ↔ TB2 + TB2 ↔ TB3 in this case).
- wpm 7mo agoEven better when you can tack on a third FW400 <-> FW800 adapter