Achieving the full speed of 1394b

I’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating: if you plug a FireWire B (1394 b) camera into your PC you will not see the claimed speed of 800Mbps. In fact you’ll find the camera runs slower than your old FireWire A camera.

The reason is down to the way Microsoft handles the 1394 driver in XP SP2. However, the good news is that there are ways around this problem. For a concise summary, you’d do well to read “Windows-compliant driver speeds 1394 cameras,” (Ann R Thryft, Test & Measurement World, June 1st, 2009.)

There’s also a note on this topic in the Knowledge Base area of Point Grey’s web site.

It’s enough to make an engineer consider going with a GigE interface!