I just committed to libraw1394 subversion repository support for the RAW1394DEV environment variable to override the default of /dev/raw1394. It turns out that a number of people ran into problems that went largely unreported whereby a commonplace udev rule was creating /dev/raw/raw1394. While it went mostly unreported (I received a complaint about the hard-coded value, but not a problem report), a web search reveals much chatter on the net about it. Sigh.

Here is an OpenSuSE bug report that sheds some light on the subject. It turns out that I ran into a similar problem on ArchLinux with video1394. The Video4Linux rule matching /dev/video* appears before the video1394 rule /dev/video1394 and udev stops on the first matching rule. The result was that /dev/video1394 is created as a V4L device instead of a video1394 device. Another Sigh.