Panasonic NVGS17B Problems Transferring to PC

**jimhammie** · 08-24-2005, 08:37 AM

I recently bought a Panasonic NVGS17B DV camera. I installed a firewire PCI Card, ( I think successfully as it is showing in device manager as installed and working correctly, I have also tried updating the drivers for it, but Windows XP says that no better drivers are available ) and tried connecting the camera to the PC...... Nothing happens. If I connect using the DV port on the camera and through the USB port on the PC the camera does connect and I can do what I want, albeit with greatly reduced quality.
After reading the Forums, Firewire is the only way to go, so I really would like this up and running. Currently I am using a 4 pin to 4 pin firewire cable, my PCI card also has 6 pin slots...... should I try a 4 pin to 6 pin ? Could it just be a dodgy firewire cable ? Or is there something else I should be doing. Any help you can give would be much appreciated, I am new to this, so hopefully it is just something simple that I can rectify quickly...........Cheers Jim

**Mike Thorpe** · 08-24-2005, 10:20 AM

It's *possible* it could be a faulty firewire cable - you could maybe try either borrowing a firewire cable from someone or even trying to connect your camcorder on their PC to find out where the problem lies.

**jimhammie** · 08-24-2005, 01:24 PM

Cheers..... I'll give it a try.

**Crusty** · 08-24-2005, 06:50 PM

One more thing to check.. make sure the camera's mode control is in the playback position. I've made that mistake once or twice.

**jimhammie** · 08-30-2005, 01:41 PM

Bought a new six pin to six pin cable and everything worked fine, so it must have been a dodgy cable I had originally. Thanks for the help though.
I'm having a bit of trouble with the software side of things now, but that will be for a different forum

Cheers

**jimhammie** · 08-30-2005, 02:02 PM

Sorry, it was a 4 pin to six pin cable that i bought.....

**Nikosony** · 08-30-2005, 10:22 PM

I'm not an expert on Firewire and USB but you shouldn't have been connecting a firewire cable to a usb, how did you managed to do this?? The data rate coming out of a firewire is much higher than what a usb (if it's a 1.1 or slightly faster at 2.0). Even so the usb is used mainly to transfer still images and much more compressed video such as mpeg or for streaming onto the net. Remember firewire to firewire and usb to usb.

**jimhammie** · 09-04-2005, 11:59 AM

I used a cable that came with my mp3 player. It had a four pin connector on one end and a USB on the other. As I said this did connect and recognise the Camcorder, but use was limited, as you expected. All is fine now though, firewire to firewire......
Still trying to suss out the editing though...........Its a Nightmare !!!