But ...
>>> ... but alas our at-hand 12.1in PowerBook G4 is only equipped with USB 1.1 ports
But a USB2 card to go in the empty PC Crad slot costs only a few quid and adds the requisite USB2 ports - also handy if you've used up your ports.
When we reviewed Elgato's EyeTV Hybrid almost a year ago, we found it a darn fine analogue and digital TV tuner. With its analogue input port, it's a pretty good way to digitise your old VHS tapes and feeds from set-top boxes. The company has now released the EyeTV 250 Plus, which replicates the Hybrid's feature set. Did it need …
Lets face it, the european world is rapidly moving towards digital TV, with the UK switching over in 2012. Most places can now fairly easily receive DVB broadcasts, why would you care about analogue TV reception and mpeg2 encoding? Just go for DVB and write the stream to disk with little or no CPU overhead, then transcode in downtime if you need to keep it.