Making my Sony Handycam HDR-UX3 work with linux (almost)

I was recently given a Sony Handycam HDR-UX3 video camera as a present (yea!). This camera can record at in HD format ( 1080i ) and records straight to DVD. It’s a very new camera and not much info about making it work under linux, so here what i can up with.
First, reading the MemoryStick Duo that contains any images is straightforward. Just plug the USB cable, select the memory stick from the LCD and you get a new device that you can mount as usual.
I have not tested HD video. Just SD video using a DVD-VR disk. Again, plug in the USB cable, choose the dvd icon on your camera’s LCD and you get a new /dev/sr* device. (eg. i got /dev/sr1 sicne i already had a /dev/sr0). This can be mounted as a normal file system (i believe it’s UDF 2.0 so your kernel must support it, which it should).
Now, the tricky part is extracting the video. The only program i could find that does this is here . Just download, untar and compile (typing ‘make’ should be enough.)
Assuming you have mounted the camera at /mnt/mycamera you simply type:
/dvd-vr VR_MANGR.IFO VR_MOVIE.VRO
to extract the .vob files. Eg in my case:
./dvd-vr /mnt/mycamera/DVD_RTAV/VR_MANGR.IFO /mnt/mycamera/DVD_RTAV/VR_MOVIE.VRO
And that’s it!
It seems that if you are using 16:9 recording the ratio is not right, but i chose ‘anamorphic’ format under xine which fixed it.
It’s rather simple, and easy to use. You can even eject the disc by typing:
eject /dev/sr1
 Enjoy.