D'oh. Well, there you go, thanks Nick. Not much help to the XL2 crowd though.

But does Sony put power over the cable or did they use the 6-pin connection for better handling and build quality?

<<<-- Originally posted by Jeff Donald : iPods are not microdrives. -->>>

Jeff, I understand your point about the iPod itself being an external firewire drive. However, according to this article in MacWorld, inside the iPod mini there is indeed a 4GB Hitachi CF microdrive: http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/mac911/2004/03/000091Peter was saying that these devices can't sustain the 25mbs data transfer rate needed for video. I have no idea whether or not this is true...

I thought we were discussing iPods not iPod minis. The minis do indeed use microdrives, but 4GB is impractical for DV, yielding only about 15 minutes of recording time. iPods have 40GB capacity with a 60 GB on the way.

Ah.... mea culpa!

So there's an idea for somebody to tackle the XL2 SDK: write software for the XL2 so it can write a DV stream to any FW hard drive.

I thought that the SDK just provided a way for a computer program to "talk" to the XL-2. How could it be used to interface a "dumb" device like a disk drive?

I was under the impression that the SDK could modify the camera's firmware. Of course I might be wrong. There is also the other route: write code so the built-in processor in the iPod does the trick. I understand the iPod runs an OS developed by Sun Microsystems, and surely it already knows how to talk to the built in hard drive, so it might not require much work, should be able to work with a lot of cameras... I hope somebody tries it. Then again, the iPod is not exactly cheap. Would be really nice to be able to do such a thing with any FW hard drive.

the software could be included on the FW drive if the firmware does not have enough storage to apply the SDK programs, the only modification on the xl2's firmware would be something like

seek file X

execute.

Only an idea.

The processor in the iPod is hardly fast enough to do the processing of a DV stream. I'm also pretty sure the OS is an Apple variant and not written by Sun Microsystems.

SDK's, typically, describe how to access and use variable features built into the firmware of a device. In the case of the XL2, I think the SDK will describe how to access and manipulate whatever datastreams and directions (in or out) Canon opted to put into their design. It's not necessarily a way to modify firmware, but to access data and variables not accessible from the external buttons. In fact, the external buttons issue digital commands to the firmware. The SDK will simply provide external access to these same command codes, as well as, possibly, more than just the external command "keys". It's all up to the designers. Whether the internal Xl2 processors can send commands, as well as receive them, is undefined, right now. The only "send" command I'm aware of is the command to RECORD sent out the firewire bus.

Typically it will have multiple interfaces, that can be implemented in personal code to achieve specific configurations. I am sure it will an IO Interface that will allow the manipulation of the Input/Output Stream, like it was mentioned before. I was told by a Canon Rep that one of the interfaces will allow a granular adjustment of parameters that in the menu sets are setup to specific values (low, med, high).

One of the most interesting things, is the possibility of interaction between the data from optical input (usually manipulated by automated functions) and the configuration, maybe we will be able to create a piece of code that adjusts some parameter on real time based on data aquired from the optical input stream.

I think that's crazy, can't wait....

I could be wrong, but from what I read before about Ipods, they don't even turn up on your computer as a Harddisk (you have to use Itunes). So even if you connected it to a laptop and used a editing program to capture it, you couldn't save it to your Ipod because it isn't recognised as a drive. Even if it does recognise it as a drive, why bother, just capture straight to the laptop.

So, yeah nice idea, but unless apple makes ANOTHER addon thing for their player, it won't work.