Canon DVD Camera Driver (1 Viewer)

[Barred Wobbler]

EDIT Title - Mini DV, Not DVD - A senior moment.

I'm trying to get my hands on a driver for a Canon MV 790 camcorder.

My old camcorder broke down and I needed to transfer some old Mini DV (sorry, not DVD as in the title) tapes onto my computer when I was using XP. I bought an MV 790 on ebay to do the task and this worked fine. I got all the tapes transferred and everything was hunky dory.

Then Microsoft stopped supporting XP, so I upgraded to Windows 7, which is my current OS. Unfortunately during the reinstallation my old drive went to the wall. Everything was backed up, both on a partitioned drive and on and external drive (or so I thought) so this wasn't a problem and I lost no information, except for the transferred video files which where on the C drive, rather than the partitioned drive where I kept my data.

This morning I was reminded about an event I had on video so I dug out the MV 790 to transfer the tape in question. A simple task, I thought. Unfortunately the computer doesn't recognise the camera and I can't lay my hands on any discs that may or may not have come with it. I've tried Canon downloads but they say they have nothing available and googling only threw up a bunch of sites that while promising a download for a driver actually try to give me anything but, including malware (which my firewall blocked).

Any ideas where I can come by a driver for an MV 790?

 

[GrahameNZ]

Sounds as though that bloke Murphy paid you a visit
As you have found there's probably no solution under W7.
As a work around how about beg, borrowing or buying an XP lappy or desktop.
Or if you still have your old XP disk grab a 2nd hand HD and install it on that and start over again.
I suspect a step back to move forwards will be the best (only) solution.
Happy to be proven wrong

 

[Barred Wobbler]

Thanks Grahame. Might be a plan.

It all went chest-up when I installed W7 and a new solid state hard drive.

I've still got my XP discs and as luck would have it the old hard drive (formatted), waiting for my son's next visit from the South-west in a month or so for him to install it as extra data storage. He knows about these things, and I'm happy to let him be the family expert. It might worth putting XP back on it temporally.

In the meantime I've been doing a bit of looking about and Amazon seems to have something that might do the job. Something called Video-2-pc that's supposed to be able to capture video from all sorts of sources, including VHS cassettes and MiniDV via a camcorder. I read the reviews and there's one from someone who used it to link to his Canon MV 800, which is just another version of the 790 I have. He said it worked well so I've ordered a copy. Fingers crossed. If it fails it's only 35 quid.

I hadn't expected obsolescence to kick in quite as quickly as this with the Canon stuff. I reckon there will be a lot of people in for a shock.

 

[GrahameNZ]

Interesting looking beast and with a 28 day return policy you can't loose.
Wish I knew about this a couple of years ago
Unfortunately built in obsolescence seems to be part of this "interesting" society we live in.
But I do like the tec improvements it brings.
Hope it works for you

 

[Malcolm Stewart]

EDIT Title - Mini DV, Not DVD - A senior moment.

I'm trying to get my hands on a driver for a Canon MV 790 camcorder....

Any ideas where I can come by a driver for an MV 790?

I could be wrong, but don't all MiniDV camcorders have a Firewire socket? (And therefore do not require a driver.) Firewire works with XP, and on my machine I have an app called WinDV which I think can do the capturing.
There's also VirtualDub which may help.
(I think both of the above were free downloads.)

Sorry not to be more helpful.

 

[Barred Wobbler]

The DV cable that came with the camera has a USB connector on the other end. I dug out a DV cable from my old camcorder that does have a firewire connector. That's when I discovered that my computer since the upgrade had a forest of USB ports, but no firewire!

 

[Malcolm Stewart]

You can add a Firewire adapter card to your desktop PC, assuming that there's a free slot on the chassis. I think they're automatically recognised, but could be wrong about this. Good luck.