I am in the market for an external USB or Firewire video capture device that I can use to convert my old HI8 tapes to MPEG>DVD. I did a quick search and it seem there are a few options but I would like to get some advice here on any products that seem to work well for this type of situation. Any brands that I need to be looking are good, other that are bad?

Thanks.

Canopus is nice stuff, and most of their stuff has "sync lock" between the audio/video which comes in handy because that's the most common problem.

It's also pretty pricey stuff though.

http://www.canopus.com/products/productsmain.php

You might try the Dazzle DV Bridge (can get it used on eBay for pretty cheap). I used one a long time ago, but I can't really remember if it was very good or not. I do know that it works well especially with computers that aren't very fast since the device does the converting.

Some video camcorders will also transcode analog material. I am not entirely sure if they have to be recorded to tape first or if it can be bypassed and go directly to DV capture.

The Canopus DVStorm2 is a nice product for SD analog capture and real-time editing, although it's now quite outdated, so support on it is limited.