3 port video capture board?

For an observation lab I need to set up three pan/tilt/zoom camera's and
a microphone in a test room and some monitoring and DVR equipment in the
control room.

Can someone recommend a 3 (or 4) port video capture card with one or
more audio inputs. Or is it easy to setup three single port video capture
cards? I need 25 fps per video input.

Also, is there a good DVR application which allows monitoring live video
input (all channels) while writing video data to disk? ZoneMinder looks
more or less what I want, but I don't know usefull it is as a DVR.

You can use one capture card and set at 640 X 480. Then use a video multiplexer but it will not capture the audio. The next best way is to use MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoder cards like the Hauppauge PVR-250. It captures both video and sound and then saves it into an MPEG file. With MPEG encoder cards or PVR cards you do not have to worry about buying a sound card and wasting a lot of hard drive space per day.

You can try MythTV if you want more like a Tivo setup .

Recent days I've searched the internet from top to bottom and I also came to the conclusion
that multiple Hauppauge PVR-250 would be the best way to go. I also saw a nice 4 port (+audio)
board Blueberry DVR-450a which apparently is supported under Linux, but I can't find any users
and I don't think it has MPEG-1/2 encoding.

Do you know if I can monitor three live video camera's on screen and save all three streams (or
one mixed stream) using MythTV? Or would it be possible to have a seperate application for
monitoring (need this to know how to pan/tilt the camera's) and one for saving the MPEGs?