The GNU/Linux platform nowadays offers an interesting range of tools for video manipulation; most of them are in development, being video a frounteer for multimedia production, they are being set new standards and paradigms of interaction which users may not always find familiar. At present time there are reliable and flexible tools to encode, convert between video formats, stream and apply realtime effects on video.
However, you should consider that most of the video tools running on GNU/Linux platform are still in a BETA stage of usability and therefore can reveal to be unstable in certain situations. Indeed you can help much in testing and reporting the bugs you encounter, that's how anyone can help free software to grow better and better, as it does.
Now lets proceed on how to configure an available video device and then browse thru the video software included in dyne:bolic, following a subdivision in task categories.
There are various devices that can be used on PC computers in order to have video input: USB webcams and capture cards, PCI TV cards, Firewire and even parallel port. Most of them have different chipsets and manufacturers and need different Linux device drivers.
Dyne:bolic is capable to automaticly recognize most PCI (internal) TV cards at boot time (WinTV, BTTV); also Firewire controllers are supported without any problem, but your device will need to speak plain DV protocol to interact with applications.
All other video devices must be configured by hand, if you have an USB camera a good place to start looking for hints is http://www.linux-usb.org, once you found the right kernel module for you, load it using the command 'modprobe modulename' and see if everything went well by looking in the last lines of the messages printed out by the dmesg command.
As usual you can have a look to the Spot's technology guide about rolling your camera on dyne:bolic: http://spot.river-styx.com/viewarticle.php?id=16.