I’ve been given the task of transferring a pile of old Digital 8 tapes onto a Mac. I’ve been a mostly PC guy forever, so I don’t know about this thunderbolt malarkey, and wiki has been less than definitive with a straight answer.
The Digital 8 camcorder has a tiny connection labeled “DV” and the Mac has old thunderbolt ports. Not sure if they are 1 or 2. I searched Amazon for a DV to thunderbolt cable and I get this…
Both ends look like they should fit their respective ports, but before I commit to the 9 bucks, is there anything else I should know about or will this work?
FireWire is IEEE1394. Thunderbolt comes in version 1, version 2, and version 3 but none of them are FireWire. Thunderbolt 3 (the modern version) is a form of USB. (USB 3 or USB 4?)
There exist some contraptions that you can plug into a Thunderbolt port that will provide you with FireWire, but I had to look around quite a while before I found one, and it wasn’t cheap.
ETA: Your camcorder probably has 4 pin FireWire. Six pin FireWire as shown in the link is FireWire 400, Mac style.
Very much not the same port. Firewire is quite old, Thunderbolt is the current standard. Apple used to sell a Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter but that seems to be discontinued.
This site at least doesn’t say they’re out of stock…
You probably will also need a Firewire 400 to Firewire 800 adapter
I won’t 100% guarantee it will work but seems like it ought to.
If you have a indy Mac shop in your area might be worth a call to see if they have ideas.
Is there a way to tell which thunderbolt version it is by looking at the port? It’s obviously not USB looking, and it’s an older Mac, so I assume it’s 1 or 2…or does it even matter for this task since the camcorder is so much older?
Thunderbolt to Firewire adaptors work to a point. I have one and it worked with my Apogee Duet V1 for a long time. Well past EOL support. But finally the drivers ceased to work on the latest OS. You may have better luck.
It does end up a matter of cascading adaptors.
Thunderbolt is at least pretty backwards compatible. A newer Thunderbolt port will happily drive any of the older versions of peripherals. Even the earliest Thunderbolt port will be happy driving any Firewire adaptor. (You can find out exactly what the system config is on a Mac by going to the “About this Mac” menu itme under the Apple menu in the top left corner of the screen.)
As a matter of technical history, Thunderbolt has a lot of the Firewire DNA in it. All the hot plug and auto config technology that Apple developed for Firewire made it into Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is effectively a PCI-Express lane with Firewire protocol wrapping. Which makes it very powerful. But directly compatible it isn’t.
Thunderbolt 1 has the same physical configuration as MiniDisplayPort, the plug on the lower right in this image (or the D shaped receptacle it goes into):
I never owned a computer from the Thunderbolt 2 era but I think the ports remained the same.
Thunderbolt 3 is the new narrow USB-whatsit {ETA: USB-C apparently} port that looks like this:
Do you still have access to a PC? Because at this point, getting a cheap (~$20) Firewire PCIe card for your PC might be the best bet. Those won’t have any of the jankiness that port adapters might have.
I’m mildly surprised there are no viable USB adapters out there, but it sorta makes sense given what little I know about Firewire. Firewire (like Thunderbolt) has direct access to your computer’s memory. This makes data transfers fast and efficient, but has certain security downsides. USB doesn’t work the same way, so it probably makes sense that it can’t be adapted easily.
Windows 10 and 11 do not have any Firewire support, and while some Firewire chipsets can work with legacy drivers from earlier versions your mileage may very much vary. I tried multiple Firewire interfaces in my recent PC build in an attempt to get some legacy Firewire audio interfaces to work, but after some blue-screens and no audio input, I had to admit defeat.
I did future proof my motherboard purchase, selecting a board that has Thunderbolt ports, so a future spend may include new low-latency Thunderbolt audio interfaces to replace my current USB interface.
As a matter of fact, I kinda do! It’s pretty old itself and just collecting dust in the garage. I think it has windows 7 even. I’ll see if I can get it booted up again. Good idea!
Thunderbolt = Displayport + USB. It could be USB 2 only if displayport is in use, or SS if display port is not in use… but that is changing with tunnelling.
USB 4 is strongly suggesting host sockets provide displayport, eg, by passthrough sockets.
The passthrough is meant to be implemented as tunnelling… so the USB host chip sucks in display port packets and transmits them to the other end as USB 4 packets, so that a USB hub attacked to the thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 host will then be able to split displayport to go to a display, AND have SS USB at same time. Without tunnelling, using 2 Gigabit per second display port display would disable the use of the 10 gigabit SS USB 3.2 due to the disabling of the extra pins, and reverts the USB back to USB 2 , 200 megabit.? With tunnelling, the hub has the remainder of the bandwidth to give to USB 3.2 devices.
Why is thunderbolt restricted to motherboards/laptops …We will have USB 4 on video cards soon… so that the USB 4 speeds will be available from the PCIe 16x socket the graphics card is using.
And the graphics card may well have an internal socket for internally routing the graphics to a different USB 4 socket that has a passthrough socket… to add graphics to the USB 4 via tunnelling. (some USB cards and some motherboards already have a passthrough socket to turn a USB C , USB only, into a flexible USB C port… like thunderbolt ,which is EITHER displayport or USB 3, but USB 2 when used at the same time.
USB 4 is fundamentally different to the earlier USB protocols. Indeed it is basically a container within which other protocols run, plus some legacy support for earlier USB. You can choose to tunnel Thunderbolt down the USB-4 wires. Eventually the encapsulation starts to look like Russian Dolls.
Thunderbolt is more capable than just Displayport + USB tunnelling. It can include a PCIe lane or two. So external Thunderbolt PCIe card cages for external graphics cards (or other accelerators like FPGAs) can be connected over Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt initially used a Displayport connector, and could to drop back to providing pure DIsplayport over the same wires if it saw a Displayport device on the other end. But if it saw a Thunderbolt peripheral, it changed protocols.
Firewire is incompatible with the early USB protocols partly because even Firewire 400 had a real data rate faster than USB-2 could max out at (high-speed, not just the weasely named USB-2 full-speed). Moreover, Firewire is a symmetric protocol. It was not possible to make a USB host to Firewire adaptor. You could make a Firewire to USB adaptor, where the adaptor implemented a USB host. But that doesn’t get you a way of connecting a Firewire peripheral to a USB port of a computer, just a way of adding more USB ports to a computer that has a Firewire port.
Using a high end graphics card as a USB-4 adaptor that encapsulates more than Displayport, and provides access to Thunderbolt capabilities is not a bad idea. It would however potentially be in competition with the graphics card’s own access requirements to the system bus. So a separate controller would likely still be a more performant option.
