Notebook IEEE 1394 Firewire Card (Belkin FireWire CardBus Adapter for PC)

Member Name: ahenry

Product:	Belkin FireWire CardBus Adapter for PC
Date:	16/02/01 (3365 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap package with all the leads and software you need

Disadvantages: Choosy about the operating system it runs under

I bought a Belkin IEEE 1394 adaptor card for my laptop. It is a Cardbus (PCMCIA) card which fits into the side. I paid £37 for it from http://gb.buy.com using a £30 voucher (see http://just4fun.ipfox.com/freebies/bookmarks/buyco m.html for more information about this).

The card comes with an adaptor lead which plugs into the card itself. This then gives you two IEEE 1394 sockets. You also get another lead which lets you plug a mini DV camcorder into the IEEE 1394 socket. Finally, you get a program for editing your video (MGI Videowave III - see http://www.videowave.com)

This card works best for Windows 98 SE or Windows 2000. It will work with the standard Windows 98 but you can only copy video from the camcorder and edit it. You can't then copy the video back to the camcorder.

When you plug the card in and reboot, it searches for drivers which installed from the CDROM. I ready to go about 15 minutes after starting.

When you start capturing the video, you can control the camcorder controls like play, fast forward etc by clicking buttons within the program.

With a 366 Mhz Pentium laptop and a pretty full and fragmented disk, the video capture was a little jumpy. I'm getting a 750Mhz replacement soon, hopefully with a 20Gb disk. That should come in handy as a 1 minute movie at 25 frames per second at 750 x 576 resolution is a file of 1Gb!

Now all I need to do is find the charger for my camcorder's battery as I've lost it and the battery is now flat.

Summary: