firewire?

what exactly is firewire? and what does it do?

Firewire is a very fast external bus standard that supports data transfer rates of up to 400Mbps (in 1394a) and 800Mbps (in 1394b). Products supporting the 1394 standard go under different names, depending on the company. Apple, which originally developed the technology, uses the trademarked name FireWire. Other companies use other names, such as i.link and Lynx, to describe their 1394 products.

Also, liek USB, it is hot-swappable and plug-n-play.

what exactly do u plug into a firewire?

any kind of device, ie: external hard drives, cd/dvd (burner drives). You can still find an IPOD Firewire cable too in most places. You can connect 2 Apples...or an Apple and a PC together for file xfers.
Even some printers and scanners....or cameras can have a firewire connection. Many things, just a differnt and in some applications faster then USB (universal Serial bus) connections. Just look it up online or in mac websites. Some really cool stuff made for firewire.

can i use it to connect my nano to my car?..

if you have an older ipod that came with firewire, you can get a female connector to connect it to the accessories for the car. i personally have never seen a car with a firewire port, even a USB port in them. but there are accessories out there that if all u had was the firewire cable you could still make it work. checkout macmall.com or apple.com at the apple store.

teenagemom said:

can i use it to connect my nano to my car?..

Click to expand...

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Yes. You can charge any iPod ever made (save for the Shuffle) over FireWire.
Here's how it breaks down:
1st and 2nd generation models only featured a FireWire 400 port on the top of the iPod for synching, which means no dock connector. Therefore, they can charge and synch over FireWire, but can't use a USB cable at all.

3rd generation models could synch over USB and FireWire, but could only charge over FireWire.

4th generation models could use both USB and FireWire interfaces to charge and synch.

5th generation models can only use USB to synch, but can charge over both USB and FireWire.

iPod Mini's can charge and synch using both interfaces.

iPod Nano's are like their 5th generation brethren, and can only synch over USB, but can charge using both.

I think the Shuffle is self-explanatory.

Warning, the following is a rather lengthy history lesson:
FireWire and USB both have two interfaces (USB's being USB 1.1 and USB 2.0, and FireWire being FireWire 400 and FireWire 800).

USB started out as USB 1.1, which had maximum transfer rates of 12 MB/s. At the same time, many professionals used FireWire 400 because of it's much faster rates (400 MB/s). The irony is, the company that killed older "serial ports" as they were called, first (Apple with the iMac) and made USB popular, was the one that supported FireWire more than anyone else, which was why the original iPod used FireWire only.

Then came the arrival of FireWire 800 (with, you guessed it, 800 MB/s up and down rates) and USB 2.0 (with 480 MB/s). The problems stemmed from backwards-compatibility. FireWire 800 was not compatible with FireWire 400 devices (without an adapter, that is). Whereas USB was foolproof no matter what (however, all devices still kept their original transfer speeds, be it over FireWire or USB).

Apple never even incorporated FireWire 800 into the iPod, and soon began supporting USB. Nowadays, FireWire still lives on rather well, but USB has far surpassed it's adaption. Most users won't see a difference between FireWire 400 and USB 2.0, so it's more a matter of personal taste. I use FireWire on my external hard drives and my iPod, but prefer USB for other uses (partially because I only have two FireWire ports on my PowerBook and one is FireWire 800, which I only get use out of for my external hard drive).

maz94protege said:

any kind of device, ie: external hard drives, cd/dvd (burner drives). You can still find an IPOD Firewire cable too in most places. You can connect 2 Apples...or an Apple and a PC together for file xfers.
Even some printers and scanners....or cameras can have a firewire connection. Many things, just a differnt and in some applications faster then USB (universal Serial bus) connections. Just look it up online or in mac websites. Some really cool stuff made for firewire.

Click to expand...

does ur pc need a firewire to do this? i really need to hook them together but i didnt think it was possible.

skateit12 said:

does ur pc need a firewire to do this? i really need to hook them together but i didnt think it was possible.

Click to expand...

That or USB.

I have a camcorder that seems to only support USB for connecting to a computer (specifically, for PC) and it only comes with software for Windows to extract movie files from it... no iLink or FireWire... Though it allows TV output via its own A/V output cable. Is there no way for me to get this DVD camcorder to connect to my iMac to import the video files? Do Macs only import movies from devices using miniDV??
Sorry, it's only relevant to this thread in terms of FireWire, but I just needed answer for this since I didn't get any answers from the Movie/Video forum.

thanks for the inputs... guess have to try to look at the site you gave me..