I’ve always had trouble downloading footage from my old DV camcorder using desktop tools like Kino, with it often locking up when I leave it to download a full tape.
I prefer to use OpenShot for editing, so all I really need is a simple tool to allow me to download footage from the camcorder. I’ve recently discovered the command line tool dvgrab, and it works wonderfully!
Once installed (apt-get install dvgrab on debian/ubuntu) the following command will rewind the tape and start to import footage. A new file will be created for each ‘break’ on the tape. The files are written with the recordings date/time as the filename and a prefix as specified on the command. Just remember to cd to the folder you want to have the files written to before running the command.
dvgrab -a -format raw -rewind -t holiday-
Where holiday- should be replaced by whatever you want to have as a prefix on each filename.