Specifications¶

2023/02/17 Takashi Sakamoto

1394 Trade Association (1394TA)¶

1394TA was the official industry consortium behind 1394 technology, and already dissolved. They housed specifications for AV/C and other protocols as well as hardware related specifications.

IEEE 1394 ¶

IEEE Std 1394-2008 ¶

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4659233

From the 1394 TA’s press release: “The 1394-2008 High Performance Serial Bus Standard updates and revises all prior 1394 standards dating back to the original 1394-1995 version, and including 1394a, 1394b, 1394c, enhanced UTP, and the 1394 beta plus PHY-Link interface. It also incorporates the complete specifications for S1600 (1.6 Gigabit/second bandwidth) and for S3200, which provides 3.2 Gigabit/second speeds.”

IEEE Std 1394.1-2004 ¶

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1490130

IEEE Standard for High Performance Serial Bus Bridges. Defines bridging devices which connect separate FireWire buses. No implementations are known. The Linux drivers don’t have explicit support for 1394.1 yet but should at least be prepared to deal with bus IDs other than the local bus.

IEEE Std 1394-1995 ¶

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/526693

IEEE standard for a high performance serial bus

IEEE Std 1394a-2000 ¶

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/853984

IEEE Standard for a high Performance Serial Bus - Amendment 1. A lot of the IEEE 1394a updates are relevant to programmers.

IEEE Std 1394b-2002 ¶

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1146719

IEEE Standard for a High-Performance Serial Bus - Amendment 2. Defines S100B…S1600B transmission modes over copper and optical fibre. Only very few details of this huge update to IEEE 1394 are relevant to programmers.

IEEE Std 1394c-2006 ¶

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4231515

IEEE Standard for a High-Performance Serial Bus - Amendment 3. Defines S800T, an 800 Mbit/s transmission mode over gigabit Ethernet copper. Probably not (yet) relevant to programmers.

IEEE 1212 ¶

IEEE Std 1212-2001 ¶

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1032653

IEEE standard for a control and status registers (CSR) architecture for microcomputer buses. IEEE 1394 is an implementation of IEEE 1212 (the most important one, and the only one besides SCI, Scalable Coherent Interface). IEEE 1212 especially defines the format and generic contents of the configuration ROM.

ISO/IEC 13213:1994 ¶

https://www.iso.org/standard/21416.html

This was revised and hence superseded by IEEE 1212-2001.

1394 Open Host Controller Interface Specification ¶

OHCI Release 1.2 ¶

Among else, this was apparently supposed to update OHCI for 1394b. But this spec was never finished. Currently available 1394b host adapters implement OHCI 1.1 or a superset of it.

OHCI Release 1.1 (January 6, 2000)¶

https://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/1/161ba512-40e2-4cc9-843a-923143f3456c/ohci_11.pdf

Look here for the most in-depth technical information about IEEE 1394 technology, at least as it applies to OHCI. This spec is gratis, whereas the IEEE specifications have to be purchased. OHCI 1.1 especially adds dual-buffer reception.

OHCI Release 1.00 (October 20, 1997)¶

Some controllers, e.g. VIA VT6306 which is still in production, only support OHCI 1.0 instead of the more current OHCI 1.1.

PCILynx datasheets ¶

SCPA020A — PCILynx 1394 to PCI Bus Interface TSB12LV21BPGF Functional Specification
SLLA023 — Initialization and Asynchronous Programming of the PCILynx TSB12LV21A 1394 Device

PCILynx is an older 1394 PCI controller which is not OHCI compliant.

The Serial Bus Protocol ¶

SBP-3 ¶

Last publicly available draft: http://web.archive.org/web/20040830205905/http://www.t10.org/ftp/t10/drafts/sbp3/sbp3r05.pdf

SBP-3 is a superset of SBP-2. It adds isochronous support to Serial Bus Protocol, particularly for A/V applications. It also adds support for remote buses behind 1394.1 bridges. Current devices that show themselves as SBP-3 compliant do not appear to implement any of SBP-3’s additions relative to SBP-2 though.

Other SCSI specifications and working drafts ¶

SBP-2 ¶

Last publicly available draft: http://web.archive.org/web/20050118090648/www.t10.org/ftp/t10/drafts/sbp2/sbp2r04.pdf

Serial Bus Protocol 2 is a SCSI transport protocol but can also be used to transport commands of non-SCSI command sets. All of the FireWire storage devices (harddisks, CD/DVD-ROM/R/W, card readers, scanners, …) implement SBP-2 and typically one or another SCSI command set such as RBC or MMC.

SBP ¶

This is obsolete and practically irrelevant.

Instrumentation and Industrial Control Digital Camera (IIDC) Specification ¶

IIDC2 ¶

IIDC2 is a joint specification of JIIA and 1394TA for machine vision products in industrial, commercial and consumer markets. IIDC2 is based on IIDC but not register-compatible. IIDC or IIDC2 or both together may be implemented by a camera. Goals of IIDC2 are simpler implementation, extensibility, and applicability not only to IEEE 1394 but also to CoaXPress, CameraLink, or USB.

IIDC ¶

This specification covers uncompressed video and camera control (focus, format, pan, zoom, white balance, etc.). Also known as DCAM.

IEC 61883 ¶

Consumer audio/video equipment - Digital interface
- Part 1: General
- Part 2: SD-DVCR data transmission
- Part 3: HD-DVCR data transmission
- Part 4: MPEG2-TS data transmission
- Part 5: SDL-DVCR data transmission (TA4)
- Part 6: Audio and music data transmission protocol
- Part 7: Transmission of ITU-R BO.1294 System B

Linux FireWire subsystem documentation

Specifications