I have just ordered a Canopus ACDV-50 and had a look on the site here to find out some more information about it.

It seems that there is conflicting information about it, so could someone clear some points up for me.

- Do I need a separtate Firewire Card for it? Some say yes, others say no!

- Does it record MPEG in real time or not? Some say yes, others say no!

All I want the card for is to record old VHS videos and convert them into VCD using TMPEnc to convert the AVI captured into MPEG1.

I have already used an external Dazzle Video Converter which I found the results poor as the resulting VCD picture was very "blocky"; a Pinnacle Studio Delux, which couldn't recognise my CDRW and caused illegal errors all over the place; and an AVS capture card, which a 1.4 Athlon, with 512 ddr Ram and a 32Mb graphics card where the picture still stopped after three seconds, and constantly crashed even within XP!

I understand though that the Canopus are the best quality, so I would really like to find out what it actually consists of in light of the conflicting opinions on this site.

Thanks in advance.