panasonic ag-dv1000

[jcrooke]

I need to control (specifically start recording, stop recording, and extract frame numbers) a Panasonic AG-DV1000 digital video recorder through its firewire connection. Does any one know how this might be accomplished through LabVIEW?

[Jeremy Braden]

Firewire and USB are best thought of as a bus. Just as it would be difficult to write a pci bus driver for you modem, you probably do not want to write commands directly to your device.

Generally what is done is that manufacuter for the device installs dlls on your computer that you can call from LabVIEW. You will need to contact the manufacuter to see if they will give you a sdk, funtion prototypes or even the header for the dll. Once you have this information, you can call the dll with a call library node in LabVIEW. Look in the "Using External Code in LabVIEW" doc for more information. You can find it by opening LabVIEW >> help >> search the LabVIEW bookshelf.

[jcrooke]

I have requested an SDK from Panasonic. I do not expect it to be forthcoming. I was hoping that someone may have tackled this issue previously. As you may know, it is often difficult to get support of this nature from companies like Panasonic. If the software is not available on their website, you have to spend a lot of effort trying to get through to a product engineer, who may or may not be willing to facilitate your acquisition of the unpublished code.

I have evidence that suggests the recorder can be controlled without an SDK from Panasonic. I know, for instance, that Intervideo sells software (WinCoder) that can control the Panasonic unit and read the video stream. It is built on DirectX technology from Microsoft and is generic in that it wor
ks with any firewire video device. If I can find out which DirectX objects to link to an Active X container, and from where to obtain the DirectX objects, I would think that I, too, could control the recorder and access the video stream.