Comment by HoldOnAMinute

This was around 2020 or 2021. I had an old laptop with a firewire port which was already running Ubuntu. I couldn't make it work. That's when I found that the support was removed from the kernel, and that's what led me to Linux Mint. I bought a new SSD and installed Linux Mint, and I was able to import my video tapes with no further issue.

An Ubuntu support page says eth1394 has been removed from the kernel since version 2.6.22.

Edit: This was a VERY old laptop. I think it has a 32 bit processor. Maybe that confounded the issue.