My Opera
Windows 7 and Making Sony DV camera work as Webcam for Skype
Sunday, February 14, 2010 9:39:50 AM
I've been using my aging Sony DV camera for family videos and as a webcam for Skype since 6 or 7 years ago. It worked fine with XP and I hopped over Vista.
After recently upgrading to Windows 7 64 bit, the dv camera stopped working and the best it could produce was blocky video. The solution to this problem turned out to be non-obvious. So here it is, recorded for posterity.
The camera is a DCR-PC350E from Sony and is connected via a firewire (1394) cable to a generic firewire PCI card that I got for my computer years ago. This solution or a variant of it, may do the trick for you. Windows 7 detects this card automatically and installed a driver called:
NEC 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Driver
This turned out to be the culprit. The solution was to:
- Open "Device Manager"
- Right click on the "NEC 1394 Compliant Host Driver"
- Choose "Driver", then "Update Driver"
- Choose "Browse my computer for driver software"
- Select "Let me pick from a list of drivers on my computer"
- Select "1394 OHCI Compliant Controller (Legacy)"
- Confirm everything
The camera now shows up in Skype -> Options -> Video with nice and smooth, non-blocky video.
hobe69 # Friday, March 5, 2010 11:33:52 AM
Michael Linktheoperalink # Thursday, March 11, 2010 1:41:18 PM
Basbas2205 # Saturday, January 29, 2011 8:31:44 PM
I read your blog post about adjusting the drivers for your firewire card to get your Sony DV cam working with Skype.
I have a similar problem: my Sony DV camera works on firewire, I can get streaming video in other applications. When I try to get video in the Skype->Video Options screen, all I get is an error symbol, claiming that my camera might be in use by another application. How did you get the camera to show up in Skype? Are you using any other tool? I don't think it is a connection problem at this point...
Any help, comments etc. would be much appreciated!
Thanks & Greetings from California,
Bas
Michael Linktheoperalink # Monday, January 31, 2011 3:40:17 PM
sorry, my post wasn't so clear on how I did that. There are a couple of small programs you can find online that make the DV cam show up in Skype - I used something called dvdriver that you can find easily with Google.
I wish it would work out of the box with Skype, but it seems to be something that they don't want to spend time and energy fixing.
/mike