a hurricane of yuck

Quick post since I'm at work. This is work-related and I'm seeking any technical advice anyone may have on this subject.

First, let me just say again that I ADORE Ubuntu Studio! I am just generally impressed overall with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and especially this particular multimedia-centric installation of it.

So anyhow, here comes the work-related question, and I'm asking it publicly here in the hopes that perhaps someone may know the answer. I have installed an IEEE 1394 (you may better know this as FireWire or iLink) card in the computer and it's picked up fine and works without trouble. I am able to plug in our two MiniDV camcorders and they are recognized. Using Kino to capture, I am able to manually control the camcorder and capture video just fine. The trouble is the camcorders, despite being controllable through IEEE 1394, are not being recognized as AV/C compliant and so I am unable to control the camcorders through the software interface. I simply get the error message "No AV/C compliant cam connected or not switched on?" even when the camera is in fact connected and switched on and sending audio and video. I'm using /dev/dv1394/0 as the camcorder device for the dv1394 configuration.

The question is: does anyone know how I can get these AV/C compliant camcorders to actually play nice with Kino and have full software control over them through IEEE1394? It would be nice to have more precise control over the start/stop in capture rather than doing things manually.

EDIT:
Okay, so I opted to use /dev/raw1394 instead and made sure the group permissions were all set for video and the group had rw permissions on /dev/raw1394. Even still, the only way I could get Kino to assume AV/C control of the camcorder was to start Kino as root. Not even sudo worked! So there's obviously some sort of permissions issue here, but I'm not sure what.

FURTHER EDIT:
Curiouser and curiouser. Having found no easy way to get a normal user to run Kino and get AV/C control I decided to retreat for now and do a bit more research before tinkering more. I changed back to /dev/dv1394/0 and tested capture as a normal user to make sure I didn't accidentally kill it. Not only did it work fine, but... I had AV/C control! Not that I'm trying to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I would have liked to have known how I managed it, especially without touching any permissions on /dev/dv1394/0.

I is a happy turtle. I have installed Ubuntu Studio successfully on a PC at work and will be using it soon to do non-linear editing. I am very giddy to try it out and see how well it works. ^_^

EDIT:
Can I just say I LOVE Ubuntu so far? Because I do! Granted, I haven't played with a Linux or *nix flavor since Fedora Core 1 and certainly not anything extensive since some rather old version of FreeBSD about 8 years ago, but... I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO MOUNT MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE! I love that it can autodetect and hotswap! Okay, that is all. Back to work now.

"The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it." - Linus Torvalds

Kathy and I are both rather fond of Age of Empires III, so we were both very pleased when we saw The War Chiefs. One of my only reservations (pardon the pun) with AoE III was that it takes place in Colonial America, a time when most wars involved Native Americans or were against Native Americans, yet in AoE III... where are all the Native Americans?! They make a cameo. Ummm, something is amiss here...

So now with The War Chiefs you can play the Aztecs, the Iroquois or the Sioux (I don't generally like using that term but that's what they use in the game so reluctantly I use it here). Yay! I can't wait to play it! The downside is that we still haven't upgraded our graphics adapter after the original in this PC had malfunctioned, so AoE III bogs down after a short while due to lack of VRAM. No problem. Guess that will be the big splurg next week. ;)

They also added a few things to the game in general, such as a couple extra scenarios, pirates and, mind you this is quirky but so geeky, ninjas. WTF?! Ninjas in Colonial America? I guess the pirates need to fight someone, right?

"Oh, I'm sorry. I have a tendency of startling people like that. It's probably from training with Batman. I'm Dr. McNinja." - Dr. McNinja