I recently bought a video camera made by Sony. Of course, the drivers that came with it did not include Linux drivers, so I was kind of out of luck. Until a colleage pointed that that Sony's i.Link is really a standard implementation of Firewire (IEEE 1394).

Anyhow, after paying a shocking amount of money (€ 15.95) for a simple 4 pins to 4 pin Firewire cable, I was in business. Simply linking the cable to my PC and the camera, and typing 'apt-get install kino' brought in the Kino package, and its dependencies.

Kino is an all-round video editing package that allows capturing raw images via the Firewire port, Scene editing, special effects, DVD export, and much more.