thanks a lot for your replies --
i know about the external firewire solutions, the good thing about the hauppauge usb2 device is that it has a hardware mpeg-2 compression, which makes it the perfect device if you have to work for DVD production or directly store the digitized stuff on...
i wanted to get the hauppauge usb2 capture device to digitize analog content directly with hardware mpeg-2 compression -- anyone knows if this would work with macOsx?
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvrusb2.html
anyone using other hardware that would work platform-independent...