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I'd like to find a Linux-supported replacement for my current card which has all of the following on a single addon card:

• analog video input with dual-standard PAL/NTSC,
• analog video output with dual-standard PAL/NTSC,
• 2 Firewire ports for digital video I/O.

Unfortunately, Fast Electronics, the only maker I know of such multifunction single cards, only supports Windows and doesn't release programming info. I'd prefer not to use up 2-3 PCI slots by having multiple cards to do separately the tasks of video digitisation, video output and Firewire I/O.

The system includes the FAST 601 card, which is the hardware part of the editing system. It's about the biggest PCI card I've ever seen in my life. We've got a two machine system setup for DVD production. The FAST does the footage logging from either DV or betacam masters, editing, various effects (they give you BorisFX), then gets shot over to the other machine (the DVD authoring station) where the sucker is chaptered and menued up, tested and finally imaged out to DLT that gets sent out to duplication. Warning: it ain't cheap.

Then again, those guys are doing big-time work. If you're looking to do some editing on little Johnny's first communion that was shot on a vhs camcorder, buy an iMac DV.

As for the question of how much disk space, the answer is "infinite". Our FAST has a 100G Medea unit attached to it, and it handles about 4 hours of video, MPEG2-V compressed. The FAST is more interesting than stuff from people like Avid, since it actually edits in MPEG2. The biggest problem you'll have is transfer rate. Think raid0 with a number of disks. That's how Medea does it. Insider their little black boxes are 3 or 4 large UDMA66 drives that are connected to a RAID0 controller. On the back-side, it looks like an UW SCSI-3 device.

If you're serious, get your butt on a plane and get to Vegas right now. NAB2000 is going on, and every major video editing company there is will be there.
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Enterprising hardware manufacturers please note: there is currently only
one DV+Analog video capture card on the market and that product lacks Linux support.

Digital Video capture cards are a limited interim solution because they lack legacy analog video compatibility. A DV and analog capture card, which captures both analog and digital video data, is what many people who buy DV capture cards later realize would be much more useful to them because they'd get backward compatibility with (S)VHS and real-time conversion to Digital Video for their old collections of (S)VHS tapes.

Enterprising hardware manufacturers please note: there is currently only
one DV+Analog video capture card on the market and that product lacks Linux support.

Digital Video capture cards are a limited interim solution because they lack legacy analog video compatibility. A DV and analog capture card, which captures both analog and digital video data, is what many people who buy DV capture cards later realize would be much more useful to them because they'd get backward compatibility with (S)VHS and real-time conversion to Digital Video for their old collections of (S)VHS tapes.

nexthec, read Chris Rijk's question again. He asked about the availability of [Linux] drivers for DV capture cards. DV cards already have Windows drivers, of course.

Chris' question is perfectly reasonable and not even slightly ambiguous (note the spelling) or uninformed. A capture card can capture either analog or digital data. A DV capture card obviously captures digital video data. It is also possible to get a DV and analog capture card which captures both analog and digital video data which is what most people who buy DV-only capture cards later realize would be more useful because they would get backward compatibility with (S)VHS and real-time conversion-to-DV for their old collections of (S)VHS tapes. A good example is the Fast DVMaster card which has 2 DV inputs and 1 DV output, analog SVHS input and output with NTSC and PAL support. The card has no Linux drivers available yet but customer pressure could change this. Send requests for Linux drivers to Anuschka.Schweizer@fastmultimedia.de who is the product manager for the DVMaster.

Nice card but the drivers suck! I'm using the 2.10 drivers off their site which seem to keep everything pretty much in sync but every once in a while, it will just stop capturing video but keep going with the audio. For example, it will claim a 3 minute capture is only 10 fps. When I play it back, the audio will be fine but the video is 1/3 the normal speed. Right before 3 minutes in playback it will the video of what was going on at 1 minute in... Try the Ulead Video Capture. That seems to work better sometimes.

I setup a FAST DV Master for a customer once. Very nice card but slightly out of most price ranges... Kindof strange because it is a full-length PCI card! Matrox also has the DigiSuite card with an on-board Ultra2 scsi controller... Geeze.

How big will the market be for hardware manufacturers selling digital video consumer electronics with legacy analog inputs and outputs?

My guess is that this could be a very big market. Digital video is the next big trend in consumer-electronics, just as digital audio was from the late 1980s onwards. However, people will want to keep their existing material -- family videos, favorite tv recordings etc. My prediction is that if there were sub-$500 consumer products to help people migrate their analog video tapes to digital formats like DV, there would be plenty of buyers, a conservative rate, say, of 2-3% of installed analog base per year. Ready-to-use standalone products rather than PC add-on video capture cards would create the largest market. Both types of product market will grow rapidly as prices for video hardware such as DV, 4:1:1 NTSC and 4:2:2 PAL chipsets drop an order of magnitude in the next two years.

For PC users, there are very few add-on cards which offer both digital and analog video capture, and those that exist are expensive and targeted at professional users, e.g. the range of 601 and DV Master products from FAST Electronics I am not aware of any combined analog and digital video capture cards with Linux support.

How big will the market be for hardware manufacturers selling digital video consumer electronics with legacy analog inputs and outputs?

My guess is that this could be a very big market. Digital video is the next big trend in consumer-electronics, just as digital audio was from the late 1980s onwards. However, people will want to keep their existing material -- family videos, favorite tv recordings etc. My prediction is that if there were sub-$500 consumer products to help people migrate their analog video tapes to digital formats like DV, there would be plenty of buyers, a conservative rate, say, of 2-3% of installed analog base per year. Ready-to-use standalone products rather than PC add-on video capture cards would create the largest market. Both types of product market will grow rapidly as prices for video hardware such as DV, 4:1:1 NTSC and 4:2:2 PAL chipsets drop an order of magnitude in the next two years.

For PC users, there are very few add-on cards which offer both digital and analog video capture, and those that exist are expensive and targeted at professional users, e.g. the range of 601 and DV Master products from FAST Electronics I am not aware of any combined analog and digital video capture cards with Linux support.