I am using a mini dv camera with firewire but cannot get Kdenlive to accept it, how do I do this please.

you are asking this from 2017...
I think that you can't do that (if your device is not appearing on capture settings of kdenlive settings page) and probably this never become an updated/fixed feature... like old analog RCA inputs... better to do that kind of jobs with old-style methods (aka dvgrab) .

but looking at other your posts this was suggested also.

Kdenlive can’t do that. I use ScenalyzerLive. Even if the program isn’t developed anymore it works. http://www.scenalyzer.com/

For our Projects KINO does a good work:

https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Kino/

Konrad.