my problem with kino and 1394, now history.
 

Couple of years ago I had Kino working with my DigitalVideo camera under Mepis 3.xx. Back then I first had the biggest trouble getting it to 'see' my camera, I also knew even less then I think I know know. I think I added some Debian repos to my sources list and every time I wanted to install packages that had anything to do with those repos it threw a message at me which kind of scared me away from doing it. One day I thought f*** it! I'll give it a go. Not knowing what I was doing I let the system do its thing. once it finished downloading and installing I decided to reboot the system. Did not notice any significant changes as Mepis' splash screen was nicely doing its job of obscuring what's behind the scenes. Then there was my login screen, it looked different, the fonts where miniscule and it said 'Welcome to Debian'. My system was Debianised. I logged in and started Kino and it worked, be it with miniscule fonts but who cares? I was happily ever after recording, and no clue what I did to my system to get it all working, until one day I wanted upgrading.

I chose to give Ubuntu a try. things are different from Mepis, so I had to 'get' the Ubuntu way and I pretty much liked the look and feel and all but the same thing as before happened with Kino, I could not get it to work as it kept coming back with a read/write problem for /dev/raw1394 (pardon me for not having the exact message) and I had everything 1394 installed that I could find in the repos. Now for me an app like Kino is nice to have but I don't use it all the time so I coudn't be bothered with it for a while. Then I stumbled across an app named 'StopMotion' and installed it and tried my DV Cam on that. It came to me with a different message from Kino as to why it could not work. It stated it needed 'vgrabbj' installed on the system. So I did that and restarted 'StopMotion' and it magically worked. Tried Kino straight after that and it works now too.

So for those of you who recognise a similar problem, install 'vgrabbj' and see if that worked for you as well.

just thought I should share this..