well, i did it. upgraded my kernel, got ieee1394 working, installed the dv libraries and captured my first video. but...the quality of the capture was awful. sadly i had garbled sound and lots of artifacts in the video. the dv help group answered my post saying a P3-600 might not be fast enough. i will gladly upgrade the cpu, its cheap. but...

is anyone out there doing successful dv capture and if so, what cpu/RAM setup do you have?

I would suggest for video editing and multimedia streaming a Pentium 4 system with lots of RAM( 512 is a lower limit), we use at work kino suite for video editing that runs on 2.0 GHz single Pentium4 system with 1G of RAM, and now the company purchases some dual-processor beast, because it's not enough.

I don't suppose you have any tips on getting ieee1394 working with kino with my dv camera? I can run kino, but I don't think it is picking up the fact my camera is attached (how to check the computer even thinks there is a device attached to it) and I get this error when I click on the capture tab.
dv1394 INIT ioctl: Bad address

Over and over again this comes up.

i dont do any video editing but to test a firewire card i hooked up a friends camera and had no problem with the video/sound quality. i have an athlonn-xp 1.4Ghz i think, 1GB ram, two 1GB swap partitions, on seperate harddisks

hmmm. tips. first let me give an update to my own post and say everything is working fine! i'm editing a full length feature in mainactor, but doing all capture with kino.

i had to manually load three modules for my kernel...
ieee1394, dv1394, ohci1394

i didn't have to do anything extra in kino to find my camera. i simply had to press the avc button and then use the controls to run my camera.

MainActor 3 is a nice program that also does capture but i cant control the camera from it.

let me know your progress. i'll look around for an address finder for firewire.

cinelerra is also supposed to work with firewire, but i have never successfully been able to configure it.