Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi

I archived all my MiniDV tapes using a cheap firewire card and dvgrab on Linux, it can be set to automatically split noncontinous clips into different files for easy viewing. It's very straightforward to use and can be done unattended.

This is an awesome project.

I have a long-in-the-tooth investment in Fireware audio devices (Presonus) in my studio - 19” rack interfaces with 10 I/O’s, as well as the StudioMix mixer with 20 or so .. I’ve been keeping an aging iMac around to use all of this with and it still just plain works, but having the option to replace it with an rPi is really appealing. The system is mostly used for tracking, so having REAPER on the rPi, connected to all that FireWire gear, just seems such a nice idea…

I wonder what the load will be like, though? Can the latest rPi with PCI hat and Firwire interface handle 40 channels of audio over FireWire, I wonder? I know the issue would mostly be SD-card write speeds and so on .. maybe this disqualifies the rPi - but certainly there are other ARM-based SBC’s that this same technique could be applied to ..

Delightful that this still works. It would be interesting to go through the kernel tree and see how much maintenance goes into Firewire related code. Other than pulling data off of old devices, I wonder how many people are out there still using Firewire.

TIL Linux does eventually drop support for old hardware.

Posted a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509902