How to download video from a Canon Vixia HV40 to a PC

Okay, so I have *tried* for hours to get this video camera to download its videos from tape to my old work PC laptop, and nothing, but nothing worked, until yesterday.  I was determined to get this thing to work.  And I want to share what I had to do in case anyone else runs into this problem on their PC.

I had to buy a firewire cable.  That didn’t come with the camera.  Go figure, right?  Amazon.com had the cheapest one.

I had to download a new Codec.  Yeah, what the heck, right?

I had to download ffdshow:

And I had to download HDVSplit:

I put all of this software on my PC laptop, opened HDVSplit, and viola, now I can see my camera and download my video.   Most of this information I obtained from a board on overclock.net.