Any way internally or externally to add a firewire port to a laptop that only has USB 2.0 and an HDMI port?

Is there such an animal as a USB/Firewire hub that allows firewire video
devices to work over USB 2.0?

Thanks,

Greg

Do you have a PCMCIA port?

What kind of laptop is it and what kind of video DV or MPEG2_TS?

I have the same question and was wondering if anyone has a solution. I have USB ports and an ESATA/USB combo port on my new HP Pavilion DV6 laptop, but no PC or Express card slots, and I need to add firewire so I can stream video from my old Sony Handycam Digital 8 camcorder. I was expecting to just hook it up via USB, but Sony doesn't support USB streaming in Windows 7.

I've looked into firewire/usb adapter cables, but they don't seem to work - not really sure what they're for since they don't do any signal conversion.

Was hoping for either a firewire to esata solution or a pc/express card via esata port solution, and then just buy a firewire pc/express card.

eSATA is really not anything like firewire and neither is HDMI.

I believe this is because ieee 1394 is a raw data interface. something like SATA really has nothing at all to do with firewire and is not compatible with it on any terms. It is purely a data/drive interface, you would have to hack it to get it to do anything else.
To get a real firewire port from something else, your only hope is parallel, cardbus, expresscard etc or something like that which you don't have.

You are left with only one capable interface, which is probably being used by your WIFI card. This is either mini PCI or mini PCI-E.
These types of adapters do exist. They are very interesting, more for experimentation or industrial embedded computing. But they will work well.

miniPCI (found on older laptops)
bwi[DOT]com/category/576 (2 different brands down the page)

mini PCI-E:
bvm-store[DOT]com/ProductDetail.asp?fdProductId=626
They may not have it in stock, haven't seen that one for sale anywhere.

(sorry cant post urls yet)

Well you might have hope by looking into the docking station for your laptop and hopefully they included it.

The FireWire PCMCIA Cardbus will easily install two FireWire ports onto your laptop. Most Windows machines will work with this card, with drivers built in.Just Follow this steps. Create a small FireWire Network!
With FireWire ports on two computers, you can share data between them. We setup a FireWire network with two XP laptops and transferred a 550megabyte file in two minutes! Now that is a fast network connection!
Easily connect any FireWire Devices
Use the FireWire Cardbus to attach any existing FireWire products that you have, including drives, cameras, camcorders, CD-ROM drives, WiebeTech's DriveDock, etc.
Installation is on the fly
No need to power down or unplug your laptop to install it! Just plug it in and go. It's compliant with both Plug-and-Play and Hot-Swap features.

I saw this firewire topic. I didn't know people were still using this. I thought it would've taken off but it just fizzed as fast as it was introduced. Maybe I'm wrong, but all the gadgets and electronics I own don't use firewire.

You're right - you were wrong. Now if you said that new IEEE-1394 (firewire) implementations are getting less and less, that would be correct.

1394 was used on many camcorders, the first HD products (such as DVHS), many cable boxes, digital still cameras, hard drive interfaces, controls for professional audio work and a number of unique interfaces including on the now-retired Space Shuttle.

So, 1394 is still around (I use it almost daily) but the tendancy has been to migrate away from 1394, which is a shame that was mostly driven by the cost of implementation.