free alternatives to capturing DV onto the Mac?

[fisha]

I'm shortly going to be getting a Mac of some form ( still haven't decided ).

Now i plan on using it for some home video editing and messing around with footage i have captured on my camcorder and also some VHS cassete tapes. The camcorder I have is a Sony TRV320 and can do analogue to digital passthrough which is how i plan to capture the VHS stuff into the computer.

However, I have read that the latest iMovie that would come with a Mac will not let the Sony work as a passthrough device ( grr, i hate when software tries to interfere )

Soooo,

Are there any good little utilities for OS X ( hopefully free ) that will not try to be clever and simply allow me to simply capture plain DV information from the camera when its in passthrough mode and save it as a file on the Mac.

Thanks,

Donald

 

[Aptmunich]

I'd check out this list of software...
http://www.pure-mac.com/mediacenter.html

There were quite a number of apps related to video capturing there, some of them free...

 

[xstep]

I did a little searching on the Apple iMovie discussion site and found this; http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1465353&#1465353

My favorite from that discussion is this; "When the miniDV tape is in the SONY PC120 camcorder, iMovie will not import unless the tape is played. After removing the tape from the camcorder, the pass through import works with no problem at all."

So it sounds like a way to trick iMovie HD. Some people have installed iMovie 4 for the importing since it apparently doesn't have this problem. They then edit in a more recent version. Of course that is only possible with a PPC Mac since the 4.x version is written for Intel.

Also your manual may refer to this topic as "signal convert function".