Magnetic: I recomend you get the firewire developers kit I posted a link to. It has complete source for the Panther firewire stack and mosr of the stack in Tiger as well. Also included are several example tools and applications with source to test against your code. Its an awesome kit with everything you need to get firewire hardware working on your platform. Reference docs, drivers, the works.

I've been using it to get the DVHS emulator in it working with my SA8300HD DVR to transfer stuff off its hard drive and on my Mac. It works quite well now and I can even controll the cable box through my Macs and set up ical scripts to record shows on my Mac as if it was a DVR, a basic one, but it works.