Using easycap in Mint

[Emegra]

Recently I purchased an Easycap video capture device to transfer some old family video footage from a VHS Sony Viewcam, From what I understand the driver for this device is installed in the kernel, (I'm running Mint 12 Lisa Cinnamon) when I connect it up to the Viewcam it will run in VLC for approximately 3 seconds then all I get is vertical bars across the screen from white to dark gray and no audio, if I then unplug the yellow video socket and plug it back in it will run again for another 3 seconds or so the back to the vertical lines, I've tried changing all the output settings and any other settings I think might get it working but no success, I also installed Gnome mplayer and TVtime Television Viewer and the they do exactly the same thing, I finally installed it onto my wifes windows pc and it works perfectly (Once again losing the "anything you can do in windows I can do in Linux" argument), although I have it working on the windows pc it's not really convenient and I would really like it to work on my Linux machine, any help or advice would be much appreciated

Many Thanks

Graeme