If your main goal is creating AVIs directly, please see AVT's Active FirePackage, which has the native capability to do this, also in its AVT ActiveCam viewer controls.  (For 1394b camera users, please be sure you are familiar with the Microsoft XP SP2 S800 issue.)

Alternatively, with AVT FirePackage and the robust Intek driver, AVT SmartView supports saving still formats like BMP, TIF, GIF, and JPG.  There are good instructions for saving and streaming images with SmartView on pages 55 - 59 of the downloadable manual linked in this sentence. Then use (free) Imagen "to play sequentially numbered images like they are a single video file. "  In addition to playing from start to finish, Imagen lets you examine arbitrary frames, see the frame counter, single step forward and back, etc.     Another freeware program some have mentioned as handy is JPGVideo.

Or use (free) VirtualDub to create AVI and MPEG files.

For voluminous real-time video capture needs, with compression, stream-to-disk optimization, diverse controls, etc., please consider Streampix by Norpix.  Streampix has a user-friendly interface, and even offers as API (Hermes API) and a SDK Plugin library, if you wish to create custom applications using Streampix functionality.

Another such product is Streams 5, video recording software by IO Industries.  It can also handle multiple data streams, triggering methods, synchronization, and has a scripting control capability.