Cannot get any camcorder to work on any firewire port

[neojapsz]

I’ve been struggling with this for months now, its been difficult to solve as it intermittent, sometimes it works, other times there is no way.

I cannot get any camcorder to work on my PC, ive tried 3 cameras, 2 JVC’s and 1 Sony. All do the same thing they are recognised by windows but that’s it. I cannot control them or capture any footage, tried capturing from Avid Xpress, Premiere and windows movie maker, all give me the same error, cannot connect to device or Dv device is not responding

I have 3 firewire ports in my PC

ADS PYRO BasicDV 1394 PCI card (Texas Instrument) (certified with Avid)

Audigy 2 built in Firewire Port

Onboard Firewire VIA chipset

All 3 of my ports have the same issue.

I’ve tried disabling 2 of the them in device manager, and using the other, still no joy, tried pulling out ADS card, and it worked for a few weeks with the Audigy firwire , then it started not been recognised again.

Tried taking devices out of device manager and re-installing them.

Tried 2 firwire cables neither makes any difference.

Tried pulling out all USB devices, again no joy

My second pc works ok with the cameras and the firewire cable so its my PC I believe the problem lies, im not a 100% sure about the 2 firewire cables as they have been stepped on a few times, but if it was them I believe they won’t both stop working at the same time, then both start working again. The PC seems most likely to be the issue, perhaps something to do with how windows is managing my firewire ports. As its intermittent its hard to narrow down, thinking only a re-install of windows XP might solve it and even that might not work, could also just try a re-install of SP2, I might have an incompatibility issue with something on my system and my firewire.

Appreciate any advice as im stuck and ive wanted to edit my stuff all year and none of it has been finished.

[edDV]

You have done the basic troubleshooting.

Make sure the motherboard drivers are up to date.

The one item that I suspect other than the motherboard is the Audigy card since that probably needed a driver or registry change during installation. I haven't followed this card closely but problems have been associated with cards that add a IEEE-1394 port as an addition. Often these aren't tested as thoroughly in all configurations. You might try uninstalling this card and see if it makes a difference.