Jack, 

Thanks for the tip about dynamic_reconfigure. 

It looks like there was an update to OSX libdc1394 and now my "unexpected sync" message is gone. I'm still getting warning messages at 30fps about

{{{
libdc1394 warning: packet 479 had error status 0
}}}

but I am getting output from my iSight. The output is only *good* output when the camera is set to the YUV settings. Otherwise it's quite distorted. 

Is there a good way to automatically detect when the camera is in some unsupported mode, and only use supported modes? 

Is there a way to get rid of these warnings? If I was seeing them in OpenCV they would make my programs useless, because any information that gets print out is swamped by the warnings. 

I'm not sure how involved with the development of libdc1394 you are, or if you are in a position to do things like make changes to warnings about error statuses. 

--Nick