IEEE1394 interface is a high-speed serial interface standard started by APPLE and TI, which is called FireWire by Apple, i.Link by Sony and Lynx by TexasInstruments. Although the registered trademarks of their respective manufacturers have different names, they are essentially a technology, that is, IEEE1394.

IEEE1394 is an external serial bus standard with a high speed of 8Mbps. In recent years, with the decrease of cost, 1394 cards are rapidly popularized. Other related devices, such as digital cameras, hard disks and network cameras, have gradually emerged. The

port of 1394 has the function of broadcasting data from one input information source to multiple output machines, which is especially suitable for AV(AUDIO-VISUAL connection at home. Because the interface has the function of equal-time transmission, it ensures the quality of audio and image data replayed by audio-visual AV equipment and has good replay effect.

Strictly speaking, IEEE1394 card is just a general interface like USB, not a video capture card. For example, we can connect a high-speed external hard disk to the IEEE1394 card. However, because most of the applications of IEEE1394 card are connected with DV digital cameras to collect digital video signals, we usually regard it as a capture card. At present, 1394 cards on the market can be simply divided into two categories: DV cards with hardware DV real-time coding function and 1394 cards with software compression coding.

DV cards with hardware encoding function generally cost several thousand yuan. DV cards with hardware encoding can greatly improve the speed of DV editing, and can handle some stunt conversions in real time, and many of these cards have the function of processing MPEG-II video streams.