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I cannot find any mention of support for the DV format on the web site. There is mention that Quicktime4Linux has a front-end for libdv. But there is no indication whether that works at the editing level, or at the capture/playback level. I will be storing A/V files in DV format, captured and played back on an ADVC-110 or the like. I would like to know if Cinelerra would be an editor option for this project without having to make any file format conversions along the way.

Keep in mind that VHS is an analog format. This means you wouldn't really gain anything from the firewire connection being on the player, as opposed to on a capture device. Depending on your deffinition of "consumer" priced, I found: http://www.canopus.us/US/products/ADVC110/pt_advc1 10.asp

I picked mine up at Amazon.com for $478.79. Though it is my second as the first was DOA (and $523.99). (It has gone back up to $549.99 now.)

The Dazzle* had given me problems before with distorted sound. I also tried ADS Tech's Pyro A/V Link but it had too many problems to be useable: it silently dropped large groups of frames; it had to be used as an uncontrolled device otherwise it couldn't capture more than 90 seconds of video at a time; being uncontrolled required FCP to beachball for long periods of time after the capture (assinging timecode data?); and it inverted the color in the middle of a capture and again while sitting idle.

I could have gotten by with the ADVC-110, but the 300 had features I couldn't pass up.

at some point it has to stop being analog, so DSP is needed.
(company's site)

I was sold on Monster cables the day I replaced the wire between my computer and my Bose computer speakers. (This was the wire that came with my Bose speakers, BTW.) With a Monster cable, all of a sudden I was getting a LOT more bass. Songs I'd heard a zillion times sounded a lot better.

Some time ago, I noticed that DVDs on my mom's player didn't look much better than normal TV programs. I looked deeper, and found that the video cable between the DVD player and the TV was one of those thin-wire cheap pieces of crap. I replaced it with a spare composite-video Monster cable I had lying around, and the picture quality improved dramatically.

I use nothing but Monster cables in my home-based video studio (a 100% Linux creation, with a Canopus ADVC-300, kino, smilutils, and mjpegtools. Given the experience above, and especially given all the RF interference generated by a typical computer, I didn't dare try anything else.

In the end, it comes down to whether you can see/hear the difference. Not everyone is wired the same. I can see and hear details that most people can't sense -- so much, in fact, that I'm starting to wonder if I have Asperger's Syndrome or something.

What you're describing may just be a problem with the Bt8x8 driver. I have a Bt8x8 card, and getting it to work well was a complete nightmare. I had to set gbuffers to 32 (i.e. allocate space for 32 frames in the kernel) to keep streamer from dropping frames constantly. And there was this weird artifact where a frame from about a second ago would suddenly get replayed. I never fixed that one. And video4linux will lock up the entire machine on some relatively common situations.

I finally gave up and bought a Canopus ADVC-300, which connects via FireWire, and doesn't rely on video4linux at all.

I was pretty disappointed with the experience. Still, in general, Microsoft is a lot crappier.

I use a Canopus DV converter to capture + display video sources all the time. They're great.

This one is smaller than the 100, which I use, but is uni-directional.

Probably a little pricey for what you're looking for ($229) but does the job great...

I find the replay's blue led annoying, they don't belong on home theater equipment.

The worst one I've seen is on the Canopus ADVC-100. Not only do they have a blinding blue LED on it, but there is tiny, red writing RIGHT NEXT to the LED. On a black case, this is illegible unless you turn the unit off and shine a bright spotlight directly on it.