Comments

FuTz wrote on 2/8/2002, 12:55 PM
I've got an ADS Pyro BasicDV card and it's working very well. Don't know about on-board FireWire... VERY IMPORTANT: check out if this FireWire port is OHCI-compliant. I know the basic card from Pinnacle works well too (I think it's the DV-500 card).
Both have the sme driver(Texas Instruments). The ADS is cheaper though...
Ref: www.adstech.com & www.pinnaclesys.com
P.S.: if you want to go with Matrox, check out the compatibilities!
DataMeister wrote on 2/8/2002, 1:13 PM
I have a D-Link DFW 500 FireWire card which installed flawlessly and performs flawlessly. It also has a TI chip I believe. At the time of purchase it was a better price than the other brands such as ADS, Adaptec, Western Digital, and SIIG. But, I haven't compared pricing in almost a year.

Probably any card that you get with the standard Texas Instrument chip will work identical to others. Under Windows 2000 the D-Link uses the default drivers with the operating system. And most likely the others will also, unless special features have been added to the card.

I haven't had much experience with FireWire ports on an analog caputure card other than the Pinnacle DVD-1000. It seemed to work ok on a friends system, however the dedicated FireWire card seems to be more transparent. It was a little more complicated trying to get the drivers from the DVD-1000 to initialize the FireWire port. It wasn't just automatic. But, like I said, once we got things going, it seemed to work ok.
JSpielberg wrote on 2/8/2002, 1:41 PM
Thanks for the insight. I need to start looking at a few it sounds like.
Cheesehole wrote on 2/9/2002, 10:37 PM
in general it's better to have separate cards over combo cards. i highly recommend getting a dedicated video card, and a dedicated firewire card.

- ben