Once you've got the cable properly put together there are two programs you'll need to download, one for making a dump of your camcorder's firmware, for backup, and one to change the registers to enable recording. The programs you'll need are RM95, which we'll use to make the firmware dump, and DVin Lite, that we'll use to modify the camcorder's registers. Both RM95 and DVin Lite need Windows 95, 98 or Me to run and will not work with true 32-bit operating systems such as Windows NT or Windows 2000. We've had best results when booting any of these operating systems in safe mode, as that will prevent any applications from polling the printer port when we're changing the registers or dumping the firmware.



Fig 3. LanC and DV-in/out connectors on a Sony PC4/5, notice that the FireWire connector only reads 'DV-OUT'.

But first we'll need to connect the cable to the camcorder's LanC connector and the other end of the cable to our printer port and put the camcorder in 'Player' mode. Once we've done that you can execute DVin Lite and you should see the below window appear. If there's a dialog box displayed that asks you to check your cable and/or power on the camcorder there's something wrong, re-check your cable and make sure the camera is switched on.


Fig 4. DVin Lite window, this window should appear when we got a connection to the camcorder.

If everything is properly connected and the camcorder is turned on in 'Player' mode, and provided you've made a working interface cable, the DVin Lite window should appear without any dialog boxes. We can now check our cable by pressing 'Play' and 'Stop' to see if we can control our camera from remote. If that works we're good to go. But first we'll make a backup of the camcorder's firmware to be sure we can always restore the firmware if something goes wrong.