I have a sony handycam 8mm.. not Hi8 or DV, just plain ol' 8mm. I think that Dazzly makes a card or USB connector or something to transfer this stuff to mpeg. What should I get? looking for CHEAP.. if it ain't cheap, I won't bother with it

Eventually, I want to get a Mini DV but don't have 1200 bux burning a hole in my pocket at the time


anyone want to buy a Sony handicam? ;)

Got a firewire card in your system? Sony makes a media converter and I know there some others, cant think of the names off hand.

With the converter, it will take analog in and send it to the computer via the firwire cable. Very handy indeed. Cheap is about 299/399 depending on the version.

Also, Does that hanidcam have a firewire port?


I'm thinking, would that older 8mm fit one of my HI/Digi-8 decks? I could convert it for you. How long is it?

uhhhhh........

no firewire on this unit. It has a MONO sound out and yellow video RCA out..that is it

I can put in a firewire card... but I don't want to spend 300 bux

I am thinking like $67 or less

no one else?

geoff, why not just copy it to vhs by the rca connectors, and then to your PC using an ordinary capture card?

well, why can't I skip the step and get a capture card for my camera?

I really don't know.

I guess I am asking, what kind of capture card I need? I have RCA outs on my camera

It all depends on quality.

I have old VHS that I wanted transfered to mpg. Here is how I went about doing it, and why I did it the way I did.


I purchased a WinTV card for video input ($45). I tested 3 other devices, 2 USB Capture devices, and a Snappy thing and they all had poor capture performance in comparsion to the WinTV. (All using 324x288 resolution, since VHS is 300x200 I don't need anything higher)

I ran RCA Video out to the WinTV Video In, ran RCA Stereo out to the Line In on my sound card.

The I downloaded the HUFFY codec, which allows about 2:1 compression with NO loss and very little CPU overhead.

I used VirtualDub to record, and hit play on the camera and recorded it in 60 min chunks. Every 1 minute of recording used 150Mb. So one hour was about 10Gb.

Then I would use TMPEGEnc to convert the 10Gb AVI into a mpg file, specifically a VCD compatible one. Then I would burn it to a disc, and tada! I had family video that was playable on the DVD player. :)

-Why didn't I just capture direct to mpeg? Because of the overhead. MPEG encoding is very intensive especially when there is a lot of movement. If you are encoding during a live capture you could drop frames during high motion scenes. 2nd, using the Huffy codec I have a LOSSLESS format that I treat as an 'original' and can make the mpeg from. If the mpeg doesnt turn out well I can just re-run the encoding intead of doing the whole capture process over.

Aside from the $45 card, the only thing you might want is a big hard drive.

Hope that helps, and if you need any of the software i mentioned you can find it here: http://www.vcdhelp.com

thx.. that is very helpful.. I will def get back to you on that.

I loooked at a dazzle 80 tonight.. about 60 bux at BB

I like your idea ;)