Vista and Firewire
Although many people have been able to get complete two-way firewire (IEEE-1394) functionality in Vista over the past couple of years, and continue to do so, Microsoft has quietly made it known that certain functions using IEEE-1394 ports will no longer be supported.
The first of these has been networking via firewire.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943719/en-us
The second of these is the playing back of content out through the firewire port.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944149/en-us
It's the second one that really pisses me off. On my new black box, the firewire ports (2 of them) both work fine for capturing video from my two camcorders and my Sony DVMC-DA2 converter box. Everything works really well. But if I want to send video back out to either camcorder or the converter box, it's a complete bust. Camera controls (start, stop, record, fast forward, rewind) work just fine from all the software that can be used to send content back to them, but it cannot stream the actual content at all... not even a single frame. This function is completely shut off by Vista drivers.
Some third party vendor installs, such as HDV cams and HDV or DV software bundles appear to supplant this in some way, according to many longtime users who have been upgrading all along. I suspect their success is due to probably accruing or carrying forward a proprietary dll and/or sys file, rather than what comes with current iterations of Vista.
But the current Vista drivers for 1394 OHCI bus, DV camcorders, etc. do not support playback out the firewire port anymore. Playback is, in fact, specifically disabled, per the Microsoft support article...
