Well folks, I just got saddled with this Adaptec/Marvel piece of poo and now I have to make it work on a Debian server. The server belongs to my employer and is running Debian “Etch”.

The Etch release of Debian does not have a driver for this card built-in and even though Adaptec claim to support Linux, their drivers simply do not work unless you are running some specific outdated versions of Red Hat or SUSE. That’s not what I call Linux support!

I’m not the only one discovering this, Brent Norris wrote a wonderful article titled “Adaptec 1420SA is JUNK!” on his blog which describes pretty much the exact situation I find myself in which Adaptec just doesn’t want to know about Linux.

When are these guys (by whom I mean most major hardware manufacturers) going to realize that Linux is here to stay and is getting real popular, especially in the server room.

Anyway, enough ranting. After a couple of hours Googling around, I see that there is an open source driver available for this card and it is built into Linux kernel version 2.6.22. Debian Etch uses 2.6.18 so all I need to do is upgrade the kernel.

The easiest way to install the upgraded kernel is to get a DEB package from Debian Backports. Go to this page:

http://packages.debian.org/etch-backports/admin/

and grab a kernel, there are usually a couple of different versions available there.

Install it and reboot. Works great so far.

PS. I notice that the driver for this card was released into the Linux kernel by Red Hat corporation. So it seems even they are fed up with Adaptec’s poor support for Linux!

I have this video camera, a Sony DVD201E which records straight to a mini-DVD disc. I want to copy the recorded video onto my PC but the software which comes with the camera is pretty awful. Besides it is Windows-only and I do prefer to use Linux.

So I have made a little Linux app which can extract scenes from a DVD disc. The camera records each scene as a DVD “chapter”. My application reads a DVD disc and copies each chapter into a separate MPEG file. I’ll publish it here in case anyone else finds it useful.

Downloading and Compiling

I’m just releasing this as source code at the moment. I have tested it under Ubuntu 7.10 but It will probably work fine on any UNIX-based system. You can download it here:

DvdChapterExtract-1.2.tar.bz2 (16k)

You will need libdvdread and libavformat before you compile. So install those:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread-dev libavformat-dev

Next unpack and compile:

tar jxf DvdChapterExtract-1.2.tar.bz2

cd DvdChapterExtract/Release

make all

Usage

1. You need to record your discs in Video mode, not “VR” mode. VR is a Sony proprietary format which cannot be read in a regular DVD drive.

2. After recording your disc, you must Finalize it in-camera.

3. Put the disc into the DVD drive on your PC.

4. Launch the DVD chapter extract tool like so (assuming /dev/scd0 is the name of your DVD drive).

./DvdChapterExtract -d /dev/scd0

It will extract each chapter into a separate file called chapter001.mpeg, chapter002.mpeg and so on. These can be loaded directly into any video editing software.

The camera also tags each chapter with some meta-data such as the date and time the scene was recorded. I have not yet figured out how to read that data.