USB capture devices

[glwtta]

I know they are not highly regarded, but how bad are the USB capture devices, really?

Keeping in mind I am not working with very high quality sources here - I want to capture some home movies from 8mm tape.

The reason I'm looking at external USB devices is that it's much easier for me to get a laptop than a desktop for this project.

So what kind of results could I expect from these things? Any recommendations for which ones are better than others?

Thanks.

[olyteddy]

The Hauppauge USB2 PVR is what I've had for nearly a couple of years. If you plan to use USB you pretty much have to use an external encoder.

[Awatef]

The device must have USB 2.0 and be able to capture in full resolution (720x...).
You may expect better capture quality if it has a built-in MPEG-2 encoder. This may not be the optimum in terms of compression quality, but it is comparable to home DVD recorders, which are far from bad, especially at higher bitrates (8000kbps+)