Certain motherboards and hardware configurations have problems grabbing images from 1394 cameras. These problems often manifest themselves in the form of:
- noise stripes and folded image patches, particularly at times when file I/O is heavy
- inconsistent recognition of camera devices by the system or Device Manager
- problems with grabbing images from the camera
So far, this has been reported on the following hardware/software configurations or hardware components:
- Shuttle FV-24 / Windows 2000
- Shuttle FN41 / Windows XP
- NOVA 7896FW / Windows 2000
- Dell machines (Dimension 4100 and others) / Windows 2000
- Dell notebooks with PCMCIA 1394 interfaces
- Machines with USB network interfaces
- Matrox G550 Dual-DVI / Windows 2000
- Ricoh 1394 Controller / Windows XP
- Adaptec FireWire PCI cards
- Single-board systems (e.g. Kontron ePCI-200, Advantech PCA6178, etc.) with PCI-based video
The following workarounds are recommended:
- On the Shuttle FV-24, the phenomenon disappears if UDMA (Ultra-DMA) is disabled in the BIOS settings.
- The problem on the Dell machines appears to be resolved by upgrading to Windows XP. There have also been some early reports that Service Pack 3 solves the issue with machines running Windows 2000
- If the problem appears on a Dell Laptop refer to the related article below regarding video corruption on Latitude notebooks.
- On machines with USB network interfaces, it appears that moving to a PCMCIA or PCI based interface solves the problem. Presumably, this is because of the fact that USB network interfaces do very little on board processing and require more resources.
- If using the Matrox G550 Dual-DVI, disable Bus Master in the display settings (Control Panel->Display->Settings tab->Advanced button->Options tab->Bus Master checkbox).
- To resolve the Ricoh 1394 Controller / WinXP problem, obtain the latest Service Pack for Windows XP.
- Try other FireWire cards, such as those listed in the Related Article below.
- Try a high-end AGP video card instead of PCI-based video in order to avoid saturating the PCI bus.
On other platforms, a similar work-around may exist, but has not yet been successfully tested.
Many system configuration problems may also be a result of deficiencies in the operating system's 1394 driver stack. For Windows operating systems, try installing the latest Service Pack. To see a categorized list of fixes included in each Service Pack, see below:
