John McGaw wrote:
On 7/2/2019 9:42 AM, John McGaw wrote:
It has to be that these things are breeding. There used to be a joking
theory that wire coat hangers were reproducing and trying to take over
the world but it seems that computer cables are in the game now.

Do you find that your stock of cables is expanding without your
knowledge? I just looked in the closet in my "office" and found a bag
of unexplained USB cables -- mostly A to B types -- that really
shouldn't be there. I already had a rack on one wall holding cables
and I swear that there are twice as many now as there were a year ago
-- all sorts of cables, not just USB but video, power, extenders, and
who knows what else. I'm almost afraid to look in the downstairs
"closet of computing antiquity" for fear of what will be there now.

What does on do with such excess? Does dumping them at the recycling
center help?

After posting this I spent some time going through one batch of
cables/adapters/whatever trying to make some sort of sense of the whole
mishigas. Did pretty well being able to sort out four or five
definitively-identifiable batches hanging the useful ones on a rack and
putting the excess into plastic bags and storing them away.

It all went well until I got to two really odd cables that I'd never
seen before. At first I thought they had to be some sort of video. On
end of each had a sorta-rectangular connector with 6(?) pins. The other
end of one had an identical connector while the other had a truly weird
connector about the size of an old mini-USB but looking like it had been
crushed.

Long story short: I finally identified these as FireWire. No freakin'
idea where they could have come from since I don't have and have never
had any Apple hardware. Anyway, now I'm able to wrap them up together
and stuff them in the downstairs closet of computer antiquities. Of
course, some day I'll have to sort through that but the last time was a
few years ago and, with luck, it will be that long again...

It might be a Firewire 6-to-4 cable. The 6 end (powered Firewire)
goes on the PC end. The 4 end (unpowered Firewire) goes to your
Camcorder. It was used for recording video over Firewire. You
started the recorder running on the PC, then pushed play on
the Camcorder, and IEC61883 standard would do the recording.

If you looked in Decice Manager, at the driver stack, you
might see a 61883.sys or similar. At the time at least, you
looked in Device Manager, to make sure you had an IEC61883
driver in there.

Camcorders with the (unpowered) connector are preferred, as it
keeps VBUS away from the data pins (and potential destruction).

You can get a short 6-to-4 adapter plus a 4 to 4 cable. Or a
6-to-4 cable does the transition in one shot (such a cable might
come with the Camcorder).

It's possible there was a TBC (time base corrector) with a Firewire
output, which you could record from as well. The TBC was used
to clean up Macrovision damage (not its normal purpose, but
useful for such things).

Paul