good free DV (firewire) capture app with on the fly conversion

[a1s2d3f4]

Hardware MPeg2 capture cards are an alternate.

I have run out of slots on my laptop to add a caputre card, unless there is a robust one with USB 2.0 connection(?)

[edDV]

Are you saying you want to capture direct to MPeg2? If so there are several.

[a1s2d3f4]

I want to capture two DV camcorders in the same time (so the gizmo would need to have multiple FW ports) and convert both of them to a compressed format that looks reasonable and doesn't take up too much space. When you say "capture card", do you mean something that is able to compress on the fly without taxing the CPU? (I have never dealt with a capture card before)

[edDV]

I want to capture two DV camcorders in the same time (so the gizmo would need to have multiple FW ports) and convert both of them to a compressed format that looks reasonable and doesn't take up too much space. When you say "capture card", do you mean something that is able to compress on the fly without taxing the CPU? (I have never dealt with a capture card before)

USB2 MPeg2 hardware encoding devices usually have analog S-Video inputs. Check out the Osprey cards or devices. They have at least one model that takes DV Firewire in and hardware encodes to MPeg2. They also have a Niagara line of standalone streaming encoders that output to USB2 or Ethernet. http://www.viewcast.com/