“To start, check out whether the digital camcorder is compatible
with Linux. The short answer is, if it has an IEEE1394 connector,
it probably is compatible. If you’re not sure, go to
www.linux1394.org, click on Compatibility and then Camera. If the
camcorder is not IEEE1394-enabled, you’re out of luck. Although
analog video capturing still is possible and works well for many
people, it is beyond the scope of this article.“Once you’ve established the compatibility, you need an IEEE1394
card on your computer. Most of the cheap and not-so-new cards work
with Linux, but check the IEEE1394 site, looking at the
Compatibility page, which has Chipset and Host Adapter tables.“You definitely need plenty of free disk space. The DV format
used by IEEE1394 camcorders requires approximately 15GB for each
hour (slightly variable), and you need a couple more gigabytes for
processing. You don’t need an extraordinarily fast hard drive to
capture the movie, though. Modern hardware that easily can do 4MBps
of sustained write and still have some headroom left is enough. It
is highly recommended that DMA on IDE drives is enabled, if your
system supports it. XFS seems to be the fastest when capturing
video, but other popular filesystems work just fine…”