"This holiday season, I was an extremely lucky recipient of a Sony HDR-SR5 video camera with a whopping 40GB hard drive inside.

When I opened it, the first question in my head was not atypical of a Linux users’ train of thought:

“Is it compatible with Linux?”

The answer was a tiny bit more complicated than I imagined, and immersed me into the otherwise unknown world of video transcoding, which is something millions of people do every day but probably never think about it.... "

Find out how to transcode 'n more at this helpful link. And from what I hear cinelerra is also worth checking out.