The only camcorder I've worked with has been Panasonic. There must be two options on your camcorder, one to for shooting DV-AVI movies, another to take pictures, which is called "Card" on the one I use. When I put the option on "Card" I can take either pictures or shoot an Mpeg-4 movie, which is downloadable via USB and has a low resolution; otherwise I've not been able to download a DV-AVI movie via USB, which has a lot better resolution. Mind you, I do all this on my brother's computer, mine doesn't have a firewire port . If you upgrade to firewire, any movie editing software should have no problem for downloading the DV-AVI movie from camcorder. I couldn't do it and I think the only way to capture a DV-AVI movie from camcorder is via firewire connection.

I'm a screaming mess myself, where on the world all my offline download goes? I've bought a Visionplus satellite card for getting satellite TV and offline downloads and if I find out how to set this up I'll die happily!