Playing DV video files on Suse Leap 15.2 is a two step process.
Copy the DV files from the camera to the PC.
[ul]
[li]Buy firewire card and install into the appropriate PCI slot in the PC.[/li][LIST]
[li]If the camera has a mini DV port (2 pin) then the firewire card should also have a mini DV port. Do not use a firewire card with 4 pin firewire ports and a 2 pin to 4 pin firewire cable adapter. This may generate a camera not detected or camera not found message. All the advice on the net says check the firewire configuration on the PC when the problem is with the 2 pin to 4 pin cable and not the configuration. [/li][li]Buy a firwire card with 2 pin port if the camera has a two pin mini DV port. [/li][/ul]
[li]Connect the Camcorder to the firewire card via the firwire cable. [/li][li]Install dvgrab if not installed by default. [/li][li]Run the command “dvgrab --autosplit --timestamp --size 0 --rewind youFile-” in whatever directory you want to store the files.[/li][ul]
[li]dvgrab has a lot of options so check the man pages. The command as described above generates raw DV files on the PC. [/li][li]If dvgrab says camera not detected then turn the camera on and off and check the cable. Its probably not a software problem. [/li][/ul]
[/LIST]
Play the DV files on the PC with VLC.
There is a massive amount of information on the net about converting DV files from DV format to AVI, MP4 or some other format.
However, if you just want to play the DV files use Videolan VLC. However, while VLC works out of the box on Windows, the version in the Suse Leap does not have the required CODECS files. I uninstalled the Suse version and installed the Videolan version using these instructions: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-suse.html.
sudo zypper ar https://download.videolan.org/pub/vlc/SuSE/<SUSE version> VLC
sudo zypper mr -r VLC
sudo zypper in vlcIf you want to stick with the Suse version then try this: https://opensuse-guide.org/codecs.php
SMPlayer works without modification.[b]
Convert to MP4[/b]
I manged to convert some of the DV files to MP4 files using ffmpeg - https://ffmpeg.org/download.html
Again, the default Suse package lacks all the codecs. I used the package “home:aevseev” listed here: https://software.opensuse.org/package/ffmpeg
I got this command to work.
ffmpeg -i YourFile.dv -deinterlace -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac OutputFile.mp4
Conclusion.
I got there eventually but there were roadblocks at every step. Needed to use the right cable and find the right packages.