Least expensive system to fire a Dazzle DVC PCI

[Haopengyou]

Excuse me for the lost post but it seemed to have to be put all together, rather than in multiple posts.

My friend recently gave me a Dazzle DVC PCI so that I can do some video capture work for the disabled chidrens school in China. I have used devices like this before and discovered that they all tend to be a bit like wives, and are only happy when they completely own and control the computer that they are hooked up to.

I would like to set up a computer that is designated only for video capture, either from a dv cam (the 1394 port) or a videocassette or laserdisk (using the dazzle DVC). My output will either be vcd, svcd, dvd or videotape. I have a few questions. I have seen answers to some of them in other posts but not addressed altogether.

1. The DVC SEEMS to manage sound internally and does not need to interact with the sound card. Is this true? If that is true, then the quality of the sound card is not very important so I don't need to spend lots of $ on a soundcard, just good enough card to let me monitor the process.

2. The DVC manages the video portion and does not need to interact with the video card....so I do not need to spend a lot of $$ on a video card??

3. If all I am doing is capturing (yes, i know that capturing really isn't so simple) will I get good results if I am using a 800 mhz P3 with a 133 mhz bus? (I already own the P3) (512 mb of memory-512 mb enough?) Is a celeron better or worse than a P3?

4. If I can find a good linux driver to use the DVC am I better off using Linux than Windows?

5. Is a 7200 rpm drive fast enough? There are 10K SATA drives as well as 10K and 15K scsi drives. I have a spare SCSI controller.

6. Has anyone ever used LitePC for XP? It allows you to strip anything unnecessary from the windows installation so you don't get all of the %&#@% programs popping up like rabbits to ruin the capture job.

Thanks for hanging in there.

[InXess]

Windows is fine, 7200 RPM perfect, noSCSI needed, processor higher then PII mid-range (but better then 1GHz). Dunno about DVC but these are general requirements for firewire cards.
Check www.adstech.com to get the idea what is available in terms of technology (mainstream, nothing too fancy) as well as Dazzle, Snazzi and whatever else. All of them publish system requirements as well as have sales support to advise you (prospective buyers...).
FW cards are stable, no maintenance and give no trouble. Devices like Instant DVD+DV (ADS), Canopus ADVC (whichever) Datavideo DAC-100 and similar allow for any kind of capture from all sources, analog and digital.
Forget Linux, may be stable but awkward to handle. XP will do just fine. Common sense approach will get you there. Don't need to be so apprehensive. Also no need to strip the system down (OS-wise). DV transfer needs about 13Gig of space for 1hr of video (sound is embedded) so space is the key.
You will need video editing, mpeg-2 encoding, disk burning capabilities and Ulead VideoStudio will do that for you (demo available from their website www.ulead.com). Going linux way may be difficult due to software availability (everyone here will help you with windows but not too many linux guys to lend a hand I think)