I guess not as prices vary a lot. The Nisis products (also looking for a 4 or 5 port USB card) look to be very well priced on Amazon- but is there something I paricularly need to look out for? Eg cableuniverse offer a similarly priced product 'via chipset' and comes with Videostudio 6, instead of Nisis's Ulead's Video Studio Version 4.0 SE.

Main use will be for digital camcorder.

Help

 

I would guess they are all the same. My guess is the diff in prices are due to branding, eg; Belkin card will be more expensive than a less well known make.

 

I don't believe all are the same. Some have different chipsets as stated and some are powered. Mate's Ipod will charge off a Firewire port, but only some makes.

 

I've got an Asus A7V8X motherboard, VIA chipset and built in VIA firewire, worked fine capturing 4 or 5 gig of video from a sony digital camcorder with DV/firewire out. Not sure it's the same chipset as the seperate card, but it seems quite likely.

Duh, forgot to mention VIA are a pretty big PC chipset maker...

[Edited by Andrewza - 17/04/2003 21:52:29]

 

So if there are differences, what should I be looking for? E.g. what is a 'chipset' and should I get a card that includes this?

 

The chipset is the brains of the firewire card - any brand card you buy will have one.

Popular Firewire chipsets are VIA and TI (Texas Instruments).