Firewire diagnostic for ieee1394 dv capture required!

I'm having terrible trouble on two systems to capture DV from a camcorder to Ubuntu 9.10. Both systems have the same issues exactly even though the only common elements are the camcorder and karmic. They have different mobos and different firewire cards.

dvgrab controls the camera but does not see any data and times out. Firewire_tester sees data packets. Kino, which uses dvgrab, can control the camera but sees no image. The card is recognised. The entire shebang works under xp with movieshaker (uugh!). I think all the permissions and groups are right and all the modules are loaded. So I try to diagnose firewire in some detail. But the apparently useful diagnostics don't work under Karmic:

gscanbus won't compile under karmic due to an apparently irreconcilable dependency on an early GTK version, and a seeming lack of support as it has not been touched for ages. ieee1394diag won't compile because of some issue with finding qt3 that I failed to fix. Neither are in a repo that can find.

That does not seem to leave much that I can use. Any ideas? Has anyone managed to run these on karmic and could let me have a usable binary? Or is there another tool that provides useful information?

I want to track down where the data is getting to and why it isn't seen by dvgrab. Well, actually, I just want to capture some tapes. But nothing is that simple.

cheers