I bought a cheapo TV card with an svideo input to digitalize my old videos. tvtime and xawtv can display the video, but I can't find the recording function that tvtime is supposed to have, and xawtv doesn't do anything when I press "start/stop recording"
I looked into mythtv, but it's total overkill... I didn't even finish the installation.

It's a v4l compatible device, it's at /dev/video0.
It has a phillips 713x chip.

Any old command line utility will do.

I can post more info later, I'm on XP right now, and I can't find the device manager... also dmesg and modprobe seem to be missing :P

[rant]After 3 reboots, constant complains about a missing firewall even though it is active, and with the help of software that keeps popping up firefox with chinese advertisment - I am able to record on windows... no sound though. I tried Windows movie maker, but it crashes before I can complete the configuration... so that isn't even a temporary solution by now[/rant]

Try cat /dev/video0 > file.mpg
<CTRL><C> to stop it.

You won't get mpg format from /dev/video0, and also this will not capture the audio data.

Xawtv usually comes with a command-line utility called 'streamer' which can combine video and audio into a single file, in various formats. Check the man page or 'streamer -h' for more details.

But personally I would use mencoder (encoding version of mplayer), which gives you many more options for the format of the recorded data. Mencoder command-line options are pretty complex, but usually you can find an example in the documentation which does what you want.