>>> ... but alas our at-hand 12.1in PowerBook G4 is only equipped with USB 1.1 ports

But a USB2 card to go in the empty PC Crad slot costs only a few quid and adds the requisite USB2 ports - also handy if you've used up your ports.

Lets face it, the european world is rapidly moving towards digital TV, with the UK switching over in 2012. Most places can now fairly easily receive DVB broadcasts, why would you care about analogue TV reception and mpeg2 encoding? Just go for DVB and write the stream to disk with little or no CPU overhead, then transcode in downtime if you need to keep it.

If you've got one of the older models, you're stuck with USB 1.1 on this model. Only the 15 and 17" models had PC Card slots.

...care about hardware MPEG2, because it means their USB controller

won't get slammed, their processor will run cool, and their Mac won't be so damned noisy while recording.

What model is the G4 12"? Is it the 867MHZ one?

The later revisions in fact did have USB 2... (typing this from a 1.33GHZ one now).