Software to capture video

I need software to capture video from my handycam. It uses USB for data transfer. What software do I need?

By this you mean record direct to HD and not to camera storage first?

welcome to the forum ba_tux; you have put this post in the hardware section; I think you are asking about software to manage video footage that you have taken; that would usually go in the multimedia sub-forum, that is an offshoot of the Applications forum;

so the multimedia enthusiasts may not spot your thread in the hardware section;

if I list a couple of recent threads where I think folks have asked similar questions; and that have talked about editing camcorder footage:

How to get started with SUSE multimedia? - openSUSE Forums

Video editing software?? - openSUSE Forums

Making movies… how? - openSUSE Forums

and this thread that oldcpu recommends:

Video editing - openSUSE

I haven’t tried pulling DV footage out of a camera through USB; we have just firewire so far; linux very happily does that;

let us know if the above is helpful to you;

Google is often your friend; so something mentioning what you are interested in; in Google; may yield you useful things: linux camcorder USB capture video … whatever …

without a lot of hassle, try VLC and see if it does what you wish

I was under the impression that VLC played footage; but I didn’t know it could extract dv from a camera; happy to be corrected;

I guess if we can usefully establish how you get dv footage out of a handycam, if it only has a USB connection;

this post Linux Digital Video

says that dvgrab will work with some cameras;

however this manual page for dvgrab

dvgrab(1) - Linux man page

seems to only talk about firewire;

this article seems to say the same

dvgrab - What is dvgrab

similarly, kino seems for firewire

Kino (software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia