Connecting 2 computers

patmustard2006

Hi there,

i have recently bought a dell laptop and when i wanted to connect my camcorder to it, i discovered i needed a firewire card. Unfortunately, my stupid dell only comes with an expresscard slot, so i ended up installing the firewire card on my old desktop pc (approx 6 years old - bought in Aldi!). Anyways the old pc doesn't have a dvd burner and i want to be able to
transfer my videos to my laptop and burn from there. I can get a usb2 transer cable plus software for approx €20 on ebay. So my questions are as follows:

1. As my pc has windows ME and the laptop has XP will there be a conflict between the 2 operating systems if i connect them?

2. The usb2 cable has a transfer speed of 480Mbps. Is this fast for this type of thing? As far as i know 1GB video is approx 5 mins long. Does this mean i could transfer 1GB in 2 seconds if it's 480 Mb per second?!!!

3. If i do succeed in transferring the video files, when i am burning to disc is it possible to shrink what i wish to burn. A blank dvd has a capacity of 4.7GB which would only be about 23 mins of video that i capture.

i'd appreciate any help you could offer with this problem.


Respect to all the Young Bangers out there!

LowTek

patmustard2006 wrote:

Hi there,

i have recently bought a dell laptop and when i wanted to connect my camcorder to it, i discovered i needed a firewire card. Unfortunately, my stupid dell only comes with an expresscard slot, so i ended up installing the firewire card on my old desktop pc (approx 6 years old - bought in Aldi!). Anyways the old pc doesn't have a dvd burner and i want to be able to
transfer my videos to my laptop and burn from there. I can get a usb2 transer cable plus software for approx €20 on ebay. So my questions are as follows:

1. As my pc has windows ME and the laptop has XP will there be a conflict between the 2 operating systems if i connect them?

2. The usb2 cable has a transfer speed of 480Mbps. Is this fast for this type of thing? As far as i know 1GB video is approx 5 mins long. Does this mean i could transfer 1GB in 2 seconds if it's 480 Mb per second?!!!

3. If i do succeed in transferring the video files, when i am burning to disc is it possible to shrink what i wish to burn. A blank dvd has a capacity of 4.7GB which would only be about 23 mins of video that i capture.

i'd appreciate any help you could offer with this problem.


Respect to all the Young Bangers out there!

1. No, there will be no hardware conflict.

2. I highly doubt your old PC has USB2. You can also encounter other complications when connected PC's via USB.

3. Blank DVD's come in dual layer 17 gig capacity. They are a bit more expensive than the 4.7 gig ones, but it might be worth considering. Either that or use some kind of compression on the file.

What i would highly recommend is that you get your hands on a Cross Over cable. Looks like a LAN cable expect it's Full Duplex. It allows two way data streaming. It's much faster than USB2.

Plug the crossover cable into the LAN port on both PC's. Disable all firewalls on the ME edition PC. Disable all firewalls on the XP pc. Also go into the ICMP settings on the XP machine, and set all the options to 'Allow'. Then, from the XP machine, do a 'search for computers' using the Host name of the ME machine. Once you find that, click into it, find the file, and drag it over to the desktop on your XP machine. Sounds complicated, but it's actually simple enough.

patmustard2006

I'll have a go at that and see what happens.

thanks for your help.:D

RedPlanet

Can't you get a PCMCIA card that has a Firewire port?

edit: sure can
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=GUN2300&cat=CCD

Tom Dunne

Firewire port for the laptop is the best option, TBH.

The only problem is that the Dell Laptop may not have a PCMCIA slot, you need to check if it is an Express Card slot. If that is the case, back to plan A, because I don't believe there are too many cards in the Express Card form factor.

patmustard2006

No, this won't work coz i have an expresscard slot on the laptop and not a pc card slot. It's ridiculous that Dell are releasing these laptops with expresscard slots when there is nothing available to stick them! After much searching of the internet, i could only find 1 firewire expresscard available in america but it was over €100 so i couldn't be arsed spending that amount on it.

Tom Dunne

This is what you want.

Firewire to USB.

Sorted.

Gurgle

patmustard2006 wrote:

As far as i know 1GB video is approx 5 mins long.

DVD data speed is 1.32MB/second.
1GB for 5 minutes video sounds unlikely.

patmustard2006 wrote:

Does this mean i could transfer 1GB in 2 seconds if it's 480 Mb per second?!!!

Nope, thats 480Mb, b as in bits.
MB refers to B as in Bytes - 8 bits.

Also the 480Mb/s is a maximum transfer speed, including overheads.
At best 1GB every 17 seconds.

patmustard2006 wrote:

If i do succeed in transferring the video files, when i am burning to disc is it possible to shrink what i wish to burn. A blank dvd has a capacity of 4.7GB which would only be about 23 mins of video that i capture.

Yes, it can be scaled down.
Theres a variety of software out there, depends on the format its recorded in.

patmustard2006

The cost for this would still be around €100 inc. shipping. Also, i've heard that when capturing video from the camcorder to the pc using usb, the quality isn't as good as when you use firewire.

thanks for helping all the same.

Tom Dunne

patmustard2006 wrote:

Also, i've heard that when capturing video from the camcorder to the pc using usb, the quality isn't as good as when you use firewire.

In your case, that is not true.

The Camcorder has already done the capture - you are simply transferring the captured video to the laptop. It is, in effect, a file transfer.

patmustard2006

In reply to Lowtek's solution, I looked at my old PC yesterday and it doesn't have a LAN port, just a port for connecting a regular phone line cable (bloody ALDI!). To Tom's reply, i really don't want to spend much money on this, certainly not near the €100 mark. I'm probably gonna buy a new PC in a couple of months in which case i can install the firewire card on it easy enough and therefore avoid all this drama with the laptop! I was just looking for a cheap, quick solution (aren't we all) but hey ho, not to worry.

thanks for all your help and advice.

mathew

you can buy a 10/100 LAN card for about €10 here
It goes in a PCI slot if you have one free.