Q:

Grab Video Stream from FireWire

I'm trying to stream a video from a camera ( Sony HVR-Z1E ) over FireWire to my Computer. The incoming pictures/stream shall be processed further by some functions which expect the CVMat format ( from openCV ).
Well my problem is now that I have no idea how to grab the stream. Okay openCV 2.1 offers me some methods ( cvCapturefromCam ) , but no matter which parameter I give him, it always gets the stream from the webcam of the laptop and not from the firewire. I heard I need to switch the primary cam in the DirectShow API ( with the Windows SDK ). But I actually don't know how to do that either.
So any suggestions how to do this?

A:

See my related answer here. OpenCV cannot capture video from Firewire cameras natively. You will either need to use the CMU1394 driver, or the Sony driver (if an SDK is available for it) to capture video from that camera, and then pass it to OpenCV.

