[CentOS] Video on (video-capable digital) still camera not accessible

Wed May 20 18:16:44 UTC 2009
MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>

I'm looking for any intelligent commentary on this - it may be a
little off topic, but I'm wondering if anyone knows about this.  This
isn't short, so bear with me.

Yesterday, I tried to download a video off of one of my digital still
cameras that also takes videos (Canon Powershot SX10 iS) on my CentOS
x86_64 5.3 system.  When I plugged the camera into a USB port and
turned it on, it showed no images available, AND no device showed up
mounted for it.  Now, this is not entirely unusual.

I know there's a .mov on the camera, two actually, so I tried putting
the SD card in a card reader and plugged that in.  Nothing.  No "disk"
was mounted, which is what normally happens when I do that.  I ran
lsusb, and got this:

[mhr at mhrichter ~]$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 072: ID 0aec:3260 Neodio Technologies Corp. 7-in-1 Card Reader
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 009: ID 03f0:0205 Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 3300c
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 04f9:0033 Brother Industries, Ltd

That looks normal, but no device is mounted.  I tried doing a
gnome-mount on /dev/sdd and /dev/sde and both came up with a "no data"
error.  I tried mounting /dev/sdd (which is where the device should
be) as a vfat, and that hung.

I got a similar response when I plugged in the camera with the SD card
in it and it shows up in lsusb:

[mhr at mhrichter ~]$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 073: ID 04a9:318d Canon, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 009: ID 03f0:0205 Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 3300c
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 04f9:0033 Brother Industries, Ltd

I even took a photo, just so there would be a recognizable image on
the camera for the Image Importer, and that worked, but the two .mov
files were still not showing up anywhere.

Then I figured, well, maybe if CentOS doesn't like this, my Windows XP
guest might be able to do something with it.  (Hahahahaha!  Not
funny....)

I brought up the Win guest, attached the USB "drive" for the camera
and Windows installed the device just fine.  I opened an Explorer
window and the camera was there, with the photo and two .mov files in
its folder, so I went in and clicked the photo and that was it.  The
Windows guest crashed, and when it came back up, it booted so slowly I
wasn't sure it was going to boot at all, and the network connections
were gone.  I tried a number of things (restart Samba, reboot Windows
in safe mode, then back to normal, restart Samba with Windows running,
on and on).  Nothing worked.  All the TCP/IP settings were the same,
and the network "card" showed one connection that was active, but no
IP address, no path to host, pings all failed, etc.

This morning, I figured that, since the guest network seemed to have
been blown away completely, I'd reconfigure it and try again.

Voila!  All my drives are now sharing properly and the NAT network
between host and guest works just fine.

I am wondering if anyone could hazard a guess w.r.t. these issues:

1) CentOS not seeing either device (camera or SD-in-reader) as mountable

2) How to mount the SD card manually given that it does not appear to
be a vfat (which is how most of these have shown up before IIRC).

3) VMWare losing its network configuration (or whatever it lost) that
smashed its network connection to the host

4) (most important) Any ideas on how to get at the video files on the
SD card (if I can mount it as the right kind of fs, that would be
enough)

Thanks.

mhr