[KaptRoger]

Well after a lot more digging I went into "playing" mode.

I had these 1394 modules loaded:

lsmod|grep 1394
video1394 13988 0
raw1394 21212 0
ohci1394 27664 1 video1394
ieee1394 83756 3 video1394,raw1394,ohci1394

testlibraw appeared to be behaving oddly. So I unloaded the modules and started reloading them one by one (modprobe -r video1394 etc, modprobe ieee1394)

After loading each one I ran testlibraw and observed the same behaviour, i.e. the camera not being detected.

I then realised that testlibraw was testing libraw. So I unloaded the modules again, and this time only loaded raw1394, tested with testlibraw and got this:

testlibraw
successfully got handle
current generation number: 0
0 card(s) found

Which is odd because I do have a card, so I then loaded ohci1394 (pure guess - well partly it is the card driver after all), and then tested again.

testlibraw
successfully got handle
current generation number: 1
1 card(s) found
nodes on bus: 2, card name: ohci1394
using first card found: 2 nodes on bus, local ID is 1, IRM is 1

doing transactions with custom tag handler
trying to send read request to node 0... completed with value 0x82ea88c4
trying to send read request to node 1... completed with value 0xd6ba89c4

using standard tag handler and synchronous calls
trying to read from node 0... completed with value 0xdbc689c4
trying to read from node 1... completed with value 0xbce08ac4

testing FCP monitoring on local node
got fcp command from node 1 of 8 bytes: 01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef
got fcp response from node 1 of 8 bytes: 01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef
testing config rom stuff
get_config_rom returned 0, romsize 64, rom_version 3
here are the first 10 quadlets:
0. quadlet: 0xa5ad0404
1. quadlet: 0x34393331
2. quadlet: 0x32a264e0
3. quadlet: 0xe1425000
4. quadlet: 0x7ab74002
5. quadlet: 0xc95c0300
6. quadlet: 0x42500003
7. quadlet: 0x02000081
8. quadlet: 0xc083000c
9. quadlet: 0x2a2c0600
update_config_rom returned 0

polling for leftover messages

Apparent success! Something extra was detected on the Firewire bus.

So taking a leap of faith, I ran dvgrab, and got this:

dvgrab
Found AV/C device with GUID 0x0080880100a65687
Capture Started
"dvgrab-001.dv": 999.89 MiB 7281 frames timecode 00:04:54.19 date 2007.05.13 21:58:36
"dvgrab-002.dv": 999.89 MiB 7281 frames timecode 00:09:46.00 date 2007.05.14 00:11:4

It works.

I suppose I am left now with the questions - how do I ensure that a) these modules are loaded (I could script it), and b) they are loaded in the correct order?

Thanks in advance