I bought the Sony DCR-PC5E back in 2001 and it worked flawlessly until today. I wanted to extract data from the almost 100 video tapes that gathered over the years and discovered that none of my Macs has a Firewire input anymore. Also when I tried to revive older Macs I noticed that they were not powerful enough to extract unaltered data from the video recorder. What to do?
I bought a IOCrest IEEE 1394b Firewire Controller Card and installed it on my Debian v9.1 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.43-2+deb8u2 (2017-06-26) x86_64 GNU/Linux home computer.
I installed the following Debian packages:
apt-get -y install dvgrab libraw1394-11 libavc1394-0 libiec61883-0
I connected the camera with the computer, ran the command
dvgrab --format raw --noavc foo
and launched viewing of a tape on the camera. This started capturing data, which resulted into 999.89 MiB for every 4 minutes and 51 seconds of movie, without any loss of data.