Due to a few missing bits in the DOKUDA video-editing team, I had to turn my MacBookPro on Ubuntu 8.10 into a FireWire (ieee1394) video recording device, through the reading of the DV tapes in a Panasonic PV-GS9 video recording camera.

Surprisingly, this did not work out of the box. It should have worked with a simple “dvgrab”, but when connecting the camera to the FW port, it seemed to remain undetected. After a few trials (including a reboot), I realized the FireWire module (raw1394) should be loaded into the operating system. A simple

modprobe raw1394

actually did the trick. After that, I went into a directory with loads of disk space and launched

dvgrab

and that started recording the input from the camera!

Done.

PS: Looking for more info, I came about these sites, but none of them actually provided me with the right answer in my case (although the fact of adding raw1394 into /etc/modules actually did the trick, I used modprobe instead):

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=256916

http://www.mygeekproject.com/?p=409 (this one mentions /etc/modules)