Cheap USB video capture cards for Linux

I've been spending a while lately trying to find a good, cheap video capture card for Linux. It turns out that the EasyCap DC60+ as available from Amazon among others, works quite nicely.

It's tragically misdetected by Ubuntu 9.04, so you'll need to build an up-to-date copy of the Video4Linux 2 sources:

$ hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb

Build them and do a make install, then:

# modprobe em28xx card=64

To make sure you're recognised as an EasyCap DC-60 (the 60+ appears to act acceptably like a 60). And V4L2 will then give you perfectly sensible output - I've only tried PAL, but it seems to work nicely at 720x576x25fps.

If you get black and white output, this probably means that your card= parameter is wrong; by default the DC60+ is detected as an EM2860 reference board, which seems to be basically the same thing with swapped em28xx outputs, so I presume that unless you force them the right way around with the card=, the 7115 is being told to set its TV standards for the wrong inputs and that mine defaults to NTSC.