It would have been simpler to buy a CardBus Firewire/IEEE1394 card They're more expensive however than a PCI Firewire card. What did you use as the capture software? For basic stuff I've used Ulead VideoStudio which came with my desktop Firewire card. I wasn't doing anything particularly fancy, just capturing the video off my DV camera and recompressing it.

The main requirements for an easy capture are: Fast CPU so you don't need to wait too much. Lots of memory for processing and large HDs to save it all.

Basically, buy the best one you can justify/afford and make sure it's got lots of disk space. It'll eat about 1GB every 10 minutes or so. Capturing the video is easy. It's processing it that takes a lot of time and CPU power.

A P4/Athlon isn't necessary for DVD burning. I know somebody who has a DVD writer attached to their P3 600 and it works fine. You don't want to be doing anything else whilst it's capturing or burning though.