Ok. I just bought a brand new pc computer. It's a Dell Dimension XPS4. 3.6Ghtz, Gig of ram, 256MB x16 Radeon X800 XT.

Now, I plug my firewire cable into my canon mini dv camera, and then into the firewire jack in the front of my computer (i also have the same type of jack on the back i think on my video or sound card port.. and the wire fits?)

but anyways i tried both jacks, and both when i plug it in the jack I get my camcorder blinking DV IN in the bottom right corner.. so it looks like the CAM is reading it?

then i open adobe premiere pro, goto capture, and i get this at the top:

"Capture Device Offline"

I followed all the steps in the adobe help to begin capture and I get the same outcome. And I've even tried other software and same type off thing, "Nothing connected."

So I need some capture drivers installed or anything? Do I need to reinstall drivers? How? What should I do!

If I goto add/remove hardware I see

Texas INstruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller

So those are the two IEEE devices i see, 2? i dont know why but they are there.

Does anybody have any input or idea as to what might be wrong?

Sorry if this is insulting your intelligence as it's so blindingly obvious, but - is your camcorder in playback mode? The fact that you see 'DV In' tells me that a) the PC is seeing the camcorder and vice versa, and b) it's in 'record' mode, not playback mode. (By the way, I'm all excited - I just won on eBay what I think is the original XPS: 3.4GHz, 2 gigabytes memory, 80GB disk, 128MB Radeon 9700, WUXGA screen, DVDRW - all for a tad over £600, which seemed very reasonable to me. It's for my daughter, who wants to do video editing while she's at college - studying law... )

__________________
Premiere Pro, Encore, Photoshop, Ulead VS6, WXP Pro, Core 2 Duo, 2GB, 2 x 250GB SATA3 drives, 2 x 250GB USB 2 external drive, DVD writer, GeForce 7300 GS 256MB

The biggest fool can ask questions that the wisest man cannot answer...

Yes. It is in playback mode. And it does blink DV IN until i switch the settings to DV->AV or something (which works for ccapturing at my school) whats funny is the computer recognized it for a split second right after windows movie maker told me nothing was working.. it even showed up as a new drive in my computer.. but i restarted to clear some lag and no lunck since again.. im starting to think i have a faulty wire.. because the camera has captured before, and now the computer has recognized at least once the camera, i just bought a new wire off ebay for 5 bucks canadian total.. so a few days wait and we'll see.

Hmmm... Like I said, sorry for insulting your intelligence, but sometimes it's the blindingly obvious that you overlook. I speak as someone who spent several days trying to work out why he couldn't get a PC to etsablish a dial-up connection, only to find the modem cable was plugged into the LAN jack... The cable does sound like it might well be the culprit: can you borrow one to try out?

__________________
Premiere Pro, Encore, Photoshop, Ulead VS6, WXP Pro, Core 2 Duo, 2GB, 2 x 250GB SATA3 drives, 2 x 250GB USB 2 external drive, DVD writer, GeForce 7300 GS 256MB

The biggest fool can ask questions that the wisest man cannot answer...