Communicate with Firewire ports in python

Question

I'm in an unfortunate position where I've been handed a legacy system with a firewire camera connected to an old Windows XP machine. Basically I'm trying to get this all into opencv so I can at least have a nice interface into this old machine.

Problem is, I can't seem to find any documentation on how to connect to a firewire port on the python side. Is there some extension to pyserial that might let me connect to this ancient machine?

Sorry I can't be more explicit, but I really haven't found much at all on this. If there's any way I can be more helpful, just let me know and I will provide any information promptly to the best of my abilities.

Moly

In response to the close vote for being too broad and the driveby downvote: I feel that this question is well-scoped, and were firewire replaced with usb the answer would be all of two lines of pyserial code. If there's something I'm missing I would love to know. Is connecting to firewire more difficult than that? If so I would appreciate a comment to that effect, possibly linking to an ieee spec. – Moly

Answer 1

http://damien.douxchamps.net/ieee1394/libdc1394/

I think this is what youre looking for.

Antifreeze

Care to provide some elaboration on how I would go about accessing this API from python? – Moly

Answer 2

There is a python wrapper for libdc1394 available here: https://launchpad.net/pydc1394 (this would have been a comment on SJPs solution, but I lack the reputation for that).

Onrush

Awkward... it looks like this doesn't work with Windows... I'll see if it works though. – Moly