One of the many things I use Linux for at work is to edit movies.  No, not that kind of movies you are thinking about … this is strictly for science work.  Anyway, the first step is to transfer video from a camcorder connected through a firewire port using kino.  I am doing this on a machine running Fedora Core 6.  I attempted to do the work on a CentOS-5 box.  However, going to the capture mode on kino produces an error:

*raw1394 kernel module not loaded or failure to read/write .....


Long story short, this is a known issue, and the kino web site offers a couple of workarounds. I am going to summarize a CentOS version of these workarounds.

Method 1 — requires a kernel from the centosplus repository

(1) Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire and comment out blacklist firewire-ohci
(2) Reboot
(or run modprobe firewire-ohci to achieve the same without reboot)
(3) Connect the camcorder
(4) Step (3) creates /dev/fw? (? = 0, 1, etc). Change the owner to the logged-in user.
(5) Start kino and go to Capture. Press the Capture button.

Method 2 — Use if Method 1 does not work

(1) Install ieee1394 from the ATrpms repository. Refer to the CentOS Wiki Repository article for the instruction.
(2) Download the kmod-ieee1394 package frpm the ELRepo repository and install it using the rpm -Uvh command. There is no need to reinstall this kernel module upon kernel update.
(3) Download packages libraw1394_8 and libraw1394 from my collection and install them as in (2).
(4) Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add these lines:
blacklist firewire_core
blacklist firewire_ohci
(5) Reboot
(6) Chenge the ownership of /dev/raw1394 to the logged in user.