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It's about as stupid as the HDTV plan, which since I cannot record HDTV without buying illegal hardware, I'm not buying either.

Uh, you're wrong?

like this one. It works with HDTV!

I'm more interested in larger capacity at home without having to think much about it. I like the idea of hot-pluggable RAID1 appliances. I've seen two models. Anyone have first-hand feedback on them?

DynaBacker 2x2.5" RAID1 on FireWire/USB2

MediaBank 2x3.5" RAID1 on FireWire

We all ready had the press release, why do we need another kool-aid dose for this limited use toy?

Not to mention miglia had an AM/FM PCI card for practically forever.

Because it takes "balls" to release a product already cleared by the courts with the dogpile on the VCR manufacturers.

as far as I know(please correct me if I am wrong), you really can't play consoles on it since the cards have a 1.5 second or so delay from when the video comes in to when you see it.

This is true with Firewire or USB TV devices; PCI ones are fine. For your Mac, take a look at this card. I bought the DVR version in January and its been relatively good (the software annoys me sometimes). Like you, I also have a Gamecube, and used it pretty regularly with the Alchemy card.

I use a Mac, and it's hard to find someware for internal PCI tuners.

I'm using an AlchemyTV DVR in my PowerMac. It's a PCI TV card with remote and DVR software. For about $20 less you can get the same card without the remote or DVR capabilities.

Another option is finding an old bt848-based card and experimenting with iTV.

As I see it, the main reason to go with internal rather than external is latency. If you're planning to play video games through your TV card, anything USB or FW is out of the question. Also don't forget that if you own a DV cam with video-in, and a VCR you can use as a tuner, you probably don't need to buy a TV card at all.

If you're not planning to attach a console to your TV card, I think the best option would be investing in a DV bridge of some sort, and attaching a VCR. Though you might not care about it now, being able to edit analog captures, either from television or VHS with iMovie/FCP/FCE is a nice luxury.

3.0.2 still does not solve the audio problems described here, although the workaround of extracting the audio does solve the problem.

There is no "better than connecting it to Video-In..."

Laserdiscs are, believe it or not, analog. (The video is, anyway, there were a few incarnations of digital audio.) Worse than that, they're composite video, so you need to decide whether the comb filter in your capture device is better than the one in your LD player. (Decide this by testing with a good monitor. Dot crawl sucks.)

I have a pretty sizeable collection of Laserdiscs, and keep meaning to start converting these to DVDR. I have this bizarre hangup that I need to move the AC3 audio, and I haven't found any way to capture AC3 with a S/PDIF card. (Pointers appreciated!)

The reality is that I should ignore that, since anything I might have with AC3/DTS is recent enough that it's likely to be rereleased anyway.

Back to your question, spend as much money as you can bear on the capture device, (I have a Director's Cut, but would get a DA-MAX if I were doing this for money.) think about a proc-amp (might not be necessary) and go for it.