I got the device yesterday. I installed it and tried it out some. It's fairly straight forward to install and use. It will suit my needs just fine. It captures video in a transport screen (.ts) and then converts it to mpeg2. So far I have only got it to work with the included video software. (WinTV 7). I tried Windows Movie Maker and I got sound but not video. I tried VirtualDub video processor but I got nothing when I tried to capture video. It didn't work at all. So far it will fit my needs. It makes DVD quality mpeg2 video. Pooh Bear

I'm not an expert so probably can't help but... I think you have enough speed you shouldn't even need to let it buffer, but know how to do so, so it's probably not Internet speed. Your system seems fine specification-wise. To me anyway. I don't think or know much about video cards but I wouldn't think it would be the physical card, but I don't really know. My wild guess would be the driver. :) This is what mine shows when I go to "System settings"--->"Additional Drivers": If it were me, I'd try a different driver if there's any listed there. Maybe you already have? Other than that, I don't have a clue. I'm running 12.04 and youtube's and other videos play fine for me. If someone else here doesn't have the answer, there's always the Ubuntu forum. Just a thought. Edit: Just out of curiosity, does the snow in my "My Page" fall smoothly or does it stop and go as it falls? This post was edited by chuggerguy on Thu, Jan 3, 13 at 20:40

I have already posted this on another forum but here's our card for this year. Amos and Andi are 5 years old and are brother and sister Minilabradoodles. Asher - my GS is 29 months. Amos and Andi learned "place" at puppy school and I used it the first year to get a good picture. Every year since when I pull out their jinglecollars, they run and place for me. Asher was the one I had trouble getting to stay still - about 40 pictures and this was the only one that was "almost" perfect.

Bigger question is are you looking for backups or to transfer the files around? If you want backups, how privacy conscious are you? If you don't care about sharing your videos, there are literally dozens of cloud services that can store or back up your videos, some for free, some for a fee. Many of the backup services can also back up any files on your computer, and make them available to pretty much any other computing device, OS etc... If you're privacy concerned, make sure you have multiple local copies of any files you want to back up. Flash drives are great for transfers, i.e. temporary storage while moving files around. They're not great for archival, they do tend to fail with no warning at all. So either have 3 or more copies on different flash drives, or use a different backup method. There are lots available, again at all different price points. In any case, you want multiple copies. Here's where DVD-Rs are useful - they are write once, so they can't be accidentally erased, they now are very cheap, so you could have 20 or more for the price of a 4GB flash drive, and if stored in a cool dark place, usually last at least a couple years. There are more expensive archival ones that claim to last 70 years, though I'd probably still check every few years if I really cared about the data, if only to migrate to current formats if necessary.