Cheers for your reply,

I have to say that my old ati card is still a good card after all these years, tv tuner, video capture up to 320x240 (albeit fixed to a few codecs) and not bad gaming.

I am still so confused over the issue with the other devices though, especially the formac dv studio which was state of the art a couple of years ago and still in production now.
Just hooked up my old 8mm vhs camcorder with analogue outputs and captured a great big dv file with no problems again !

Weird.
Maybe its the scart lead from the vcr or auto tracking ?