(I am maintainer of the upstream kernel's IEEE 1394 driver subsystem.  I
don't have Ubuntu myself.)

> 8. Realize you need to modprobe raw1394 module into your running
kernel.

This could be a problem with Ubuntu's udev setup, or it could be a
problem at the kernel level or hardware level.

Whenever a DV/ miniDV/ HDV camcorder is plugged in and is recognized as
such by the ieee1394 base driver (which needs the ohci1394 underneath),
ieee1394 emits a hotplug event which should cause raw1394 be loaded
automatically.  raw1394's insertion should cause udev to create the
/dev/raw1394 file, and at least that latter part apparently works for
you.

> 9. Also realize you must have special privileges in order to access the 
> device,
> which are not granted to you by default.
> 10. Grant yourself some privileges, or simply run the video editing 
> application
> as root (via gksu).

It is policy in Ubuntu to grant only the root user access to the
/dev/raw1394 file.  Most other distributions which provide the raw1394
driver grant every user in a "video" group or something like that access
to /dev/raw1394.

This is because of security concerns of the Ubuntu maintainers; see bug
6290.  However, there is light at the end of the tunnel since we are
getting new firewire drivers into shape which will allow distributors to
implement finer grained access policies.  The new drivers don't use a
single device file for all devices but a file for each FireWire node
(e.g. one for the controller, one for a plugged-in camera...).  There
appear to be Jaunty test kernel packages which have the new drivers
enabled in parallel to the old ones for advanced users to try them.  See
also bug 276463 (driver migration) and bug 311804 (libraw1394 migration;
libraw1394 v2 is required to freely switch between old drivers and new
drivers, libraw1394 v2.0.1 enables fine-grained access permission
policy).

> a. You'll manage to start capturing video, and hope you wont drop
> any frames which is rarely the case, as usually several frames are
> dropped every now and again due to buffer underruns (what the...??)
> even in no encoding capture mode (raw).

So there are problems during FireWire I/O or related to disk I/O.  There
is DMA enabled for the harddisk, right?  (hdparm -i /dev/... lists
available and currently active DMA modes.  It is highly likely that the
kernel did enable DMA properly.)

> b. You'll still get a "No camera found" error, which truely I'm in the
> dark as to why.

Could be the same as
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=114103&aid=2492640&group_id=14103
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449252
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477279
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=7aea52800901260333i2a47825dv95a838cad3e5ee90%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=kino-dev

Do you have a Panasonic or Samsung camcorder?  It could presumably also
happen with other camcorders though; it's just that we only discovered
the nature of the problem and its solution very recently.

> What I expected to happen, since things should 'just work', is that once
> I plug in a camcorder to the 1394 jack, I'll get a popup window asking
> me if I want to capture video from the device.

Yes, that would be good to have.  Would have to be implemented in Gnome
and/or KDE.  I don't know, maybe there is already integration of this
sort between kernel -- KDE 4-- kdenlive.  (kdenlive is in active
development, while kino is retired to low maintenance mode.)

> I also expect that a simple user, using the computer, wont need to
> meddle with privileges, in order to get the actual device working for
> them,

That's, as mentioned, mostly a Ubuntu-specific problem, to be fixed in
the short term by the user himself and in the long term by switching to
the new drivers with more flexible permissions policy.  Ironically, the
new drivers are sponsored by Red Hat.  Good for all Linux users but
regarding the /dev/raw1394 issue especially good for Ubuntu users.

> and will be able to make simple home movie DVDs easy, using some
> simple editing tool (KINO?) out-of-the-box.

DV capture does actually work out-of-the-box for quite a lot of people,
besides the missing pop-up dialogue when a camera was plugged in, and
besides Ubuntu's bug 6290.

-- 
raw1394 DV sampling should work out-of-the-box
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/300239
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