It may be worth your while to upgrade to windows xp. Yes you do need software for it. I purchased a dvd burner which came with some software for transferring the video from the camera though firewire. It is called ulead movie factory 3. There is another one called cyberlink director 3 which does the same thing. type those names into google.com to learn more about them. I only say upgrade to windows xp because once you start working with video files on a pc win98 just doesn't really cut it. good luck.