A windows loving friend (read in zealot) is actually sniffing around Linux, but he has a question. This is a Linux noob I'm talking about but a skilled windows guy.

His question was, can you hook up a DV camcorder with a firewire connection and capture and encode direct to DivX in Linux, in one step. The aim being to hook up the camcorder, 'set and forget', return after a while and have the DivX file ready to view.

Is there any software that will do that. He's tech savy but has no desire to delve deep in config files. The command line wont intimidate him too much though, if it's not too complex.

Well, what I would do is use dvgrab to get the video from the camera and pipe the output to ffmpeg or some other program capable of transcoding from stdin.

See near the bottom of this page for possible encoding options for on-the-fly encoding:
http://www.linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/TV_Recording

If the computer is powerful enough and you choose a fast encoding codec like x264, I think it now even has multithreading support, then everything should be fine.

Thanks for that, sorry for the delay in replying. No email about thread update received.

It was kinda long ago, not even the link I posted works anymore

So it worked ? You can probably use mencoder, transcode, or ffmpeg to do this.

This was part of a bigger project the solution to which has been to use Amazon s3 to fire up virtual machines on demand and encode there. The on the fly requirement was dropped.