[mpeg2] Recommended capture cards?

[Lawrence Gold <gold@shell.aros.net>]

Hi,

I'm thinking about purchasing a relatively inexpensive capture card to use
under Linux, such as a BT848/BT878-based board.

Although I have a kfir card, I'd like to play around with capturing
uncompressed video and encoding it with sampeg or bbmpeg.

Does anyone have any recommendations?  (Especially with regard to
simultaneous audio capture.)

I'm trying to encode a video at SVCD bitrates (~2.6MBps); it has a lot of
flashing/strobing, though, and there tends to be much pixellation.  My
understanding of sampeg is that being scene-adaptive, it should be able to
insert more I-frames in the difficult sections.  Can kfir do anything like
this?  (I assume no, since it's a consumer board.)  The only way I've
found to get rid of the pixellation so far is to boost the bitrate to 4 or
5MBps.  But this makes the videos a bit large...

Thanks for listening to my ramblings.  :-)