[KaptRoger]

Thanks but actually I have a propensity for leaping in with both feet.

I have subsequently discovered that my "solution" was entirely coincidental with events. :-(

It appears (I'm being cautious here because I don't wish to offend any one), that at least with my firewire card that you have to randomly unload and reload the firewire drivers to be able to see my DV camera. It appears to be completely random. Rebooting also doesn't fix the issue necessarily, repeated reboots will (sigh) eventually.

So I ended up writing a naff script to be run as root to unload and reload the modules until the camera (turned on and ready to use) was recognised. The script is dedicated to finding the one and only node on my firewire bus (excluding the card itself), any bus with extra nodes would require the script to be edited. I enclose it below for others who might need this sort of resolution.

#!/bin/bash

while true
do
    modprobe -r dv1394 -r raw1394 -r ohci1394
    modprobe ohci1394
    modprobe raw1394
    sleep 5
    if [ `testlibraw|grep -c "got fcp response from node 1"` -eq 0 ]
    then
	echo "No result"
	sleep 5
    else
	echo "Success found node 1"
	exit
    fi
done

Oh and in my opinion Kino beats dvgrab hands down. :-)