[plug] Video capture adapters with Linux drivers?

[Mike Holland]

Denis Brown wrote:

> Recommendations for video grabbers with Linux support?   USB / Firewire 

I know of two approaches:

1) Use a digital video camera to convert pal/ntsc input to digital mjpeg 
out over firewire.

2) most cheap PCI TV cards work fine with Linux. Even digital TV cards
    sometimes have an analog S-video input.

The second gives better results in my experience. Modern CPUs have no 
problem doing real-time compression of the incoming frames.

"mencoder" will do this.