Linux drivers for this capture card are available at
http://pvrusb.sourceforge.net/
It should be noted that the linux driver only supports composite video input (not S-video or TV tuner input).
I use this capture card on both Windows XP and linux. Curiously, it seems to run a lot better in linux than in Windows!
I only use the full D1 (6 mbit/s) capture mode. At this rate a full hour of video takes up about 2.2GB. This data rate is perfect for burning DVDs. Note that the card does not output DVD sequence headers in its mpeg output stream, but you can fix that (in Linux) simply by remuxing the stream. Reencoding is not necessary.
The audio quality is noticeably better in the Linux driver than in the Windows driver. In Windows, no matter what I try, the audio is clipped at the peaks and you can hear the distortion very clearly; whereas, with Linux, the audio sounds very clean and enjoyable. On the other hand, video settings (such as brightness, saturation, tint) are hard to adjust in the linux driver--you have to reverse engineer the registers and modify the driver source code. It's no problem for me, but some people would certainly be put off by that.
On rare occasions (maybe 5-10% of the time) the kernel driver will hang the system when the card is disconnected. I attribute this instability to driver immaturity, but I don't know what's really at fault. There is never any problem when operating the card; it only shows up upon disconnection. Sadly, this is still better than the Windows XP driver, which fails for me approximately half the time.
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