Hey, I'm having a lot of trouble capturing video off of my new camera: The Canon XH-A1. Whenever I connect the camera through my firewire cable, it gives me a message about 'new hardware' AV/C.
![B and c camera B and c camera](https://cpn.canon-europe.com/files/product/camcorders/xh_g1_a1/header.jpg)
There have been quite a number of posts on various video forums concerning intermittent XP connectivity issues with Canon Vixia High-definition video camcorders (HVC). I considered joining one of these to try to help clarify the situation, but most are by now very deep, and it takes the reader much time to create semantic context. So, I've created a new topic, and started it off with what I hope will be a canonical model and description of how XP deals with HDV, which is at the root of the problem, and give explicit instructions to guarantee that, when attached to a 1394 port, will be recognized by the operating system. The description given is specific to Canon devices, but may assist owners of other brands too as the basic problem of XP recognizing an HDV is specific to Windows XP, not the device.
European readers should note that television standards referred to are North American. Also please note that this article has also been posted on Videohelp.com. Canon's HVC Vixia devices supply video and still image output through five ports: 1. An AV terminal: 3.5 mm.
TIP jack for transmitting composite video to standard definition analogue devices; 2. An RGB terminal: proprietary jack for transmitting component video to high definition analogue devices; 3. A HDMI terminal: HDMI 1.2 with Type A connector for transmitting component digital video in high definition; 4. An IEEE 1394 terminal: IEEE 1394a-2000 4 pin (unpowered) high speed serial bus; 5. A USB terminal: USB 2.0 with mini-B connector for transmitting still images. The serial bus and USB ports are both input/output, the others being strictly one-way outbound. In addition to asynchronous streaming and other minor functional improvements such as power-saving, suspend mode and packet concatenation, the 'a' upgrade on the bus standardized the 4-circuit alpha connector developed by Sony ('i-Link'), by 2000 widely in use in camcorders and laptops.
![B and c camera B and c camera](https://www.canon.co.uk/Images/Image1_tcm14-380270.jpg)
It is fully data compatible with the 6-circuit alpha interfaces, but lacks the power lines, and has since been adopted by most VDC manufacturers. Like most manufacturers, Canon included the 1394 serial bus since its data transfer rate generally outperforms USB and has become an industry standard.
Among its many virtues, because the bus can move data in both directions, it is able to be used for 'pull' operations, such as extracting video from a DVC on demand. The pull agent is typically a video editing application such as HDVSplit, Windows MovieMaker, Adobe Premier Pro, Vegas and the like. Most video editors will recognize a variety of sources from which to transfer video: analogue ports such as S-video, RGB component and NTSC composite video, and digital ports such as 1394 interface, HDMI, DVI, etc. While video can be captured by external devices using any of the three Canon output-only ports, this has to be done on a 'push' basis, and to an analogue port for the AV or RGB ports. Receiving software such as video editors or dumb transfer programs such as ftp streaming variants for these is 'turned on' and waits for a data stream to be supplied by the DVC on playback, i.e. 'pushed' out.