Pinnacle Systems produces digital video hardware and software.

One of their external analog to digital converter boxes is the Pinnacle MovieBox DV. Like the name MovieBox DV suggests it's connected to your computer via the firewire ([ieee1394]) interface. I bought it because I thought it has an realtime MPEG hardware encoder. Returning home I discovered that it is actually an analog to DV converter which is better because:

• you get out-of-the-box a good quality (3.6MB/s broadcast quality)
• you can easily access it with linux kernel modules and userland software
• you can ignore the windows software delivered with the MovieBox DV

This page covers some experiences with the MovieBox DV.