The GNU/Linux platform nowadays offers an interesting range of tools for video production, editing and manipulation; you can play all kind of video files and DVDs, but also encode them for distribution and switch between formats. Furthermore, you'll find software for recording, veejaying and streaming, non-linear editing and subtitling.
However, you should consider that most of the video tools running on GNU/Linux platform are in development: 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. They all 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) and now also USB webcams as well Firewire controllers: they will all be initialized at boot and can be accessed from the video device /dev/video0 or subsequent numbers (video1, video2 ..) in case you have more than one.
If your video device is not recognized automatically (the /dev/video doesn't exists) then you need to configure it by hand. In case of USB webcams, if your is not recognized automatically a good place to look for hints is the linux-usb website. Also the Spot's guide about rolling your camera is a good place to visit for more informations on how to proceed.
If the online documentation says your device is supported by a particular kernel driver, you can try to 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. Many modules are already present in dyne:bolic, but some might require to be compiled using the kernel sources, which is a more complicated process that can't be explained here: you'll need to find more instructions online about how to do it and download the dyne:II kernel sources using dyneSDK (see the DEVELOPMENT chapter about it).