Discussion

Bring back MiniDV with this Raspberry Pi FireWire HAT

icyfox: Digitizing my old tapes was one of the most rewarding side projects that I did over the last year. I managed to get in under the wire (pun intended) of Firewire compatibility on Sequoia and a long daisy-chain of adapters. But it was clear the days of this approach were numbered. I'm optimistic these 3rd party accessories will become more standardized into self-contained cheap boxes where people can easily transfer over their stuff before camcorders degrade.My pipeline went camera -> dvrescue -> ffmpeg -> clip chunking -> gemini for auto tagging of family members and locations where things were shot.We now have all our family's footage hosted on a NAS with Jellyfin serving over Tailscale to my parents Macbooks. I found the clip chunking in particular made the footage a lot more watchable than just importing the two-hour long tapes although ymmv.

eisa01: I am going to finish such a project soon myself, including some old Video8 tapes! Sounds like you're on macOS, Any reason you didn't use iMovie for the capture itself?The Video8 tapes have already been digitalized via a Digital8 camcorder, but apparently you can get even better quality out of old analog tapes with the vhsdecode project. Let's see if I ever get around to that, but at least it bypass Firewire entirely: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://www.reddit.com/r/vhsdecode/

romanhn: Went through a very similar journey recently as well. In my case using a Macbook was a non-starter, as certain adapters are prohibitively expensive these days, if you can even get your hands on one. Thankfully my son has a desktop Windows PC and Firewire PCI cards are cheap and plentiful, so getting connected that way worked out. Much better than an earlier attempt via RCA cables (simple but digital -> analog -> digital is not the way to go).My pipeline was camera -> WinDV -> DVdate (to extract exact datetimes into srt subtitles) -> Handbrake (to convert to mp4).

EvanAnderson: Discussion of prior post (FireWire on a Raspberry Pi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535249

icyfox: Mostly wanted to fully automate the pipeline (auto-rewind tape, scan tape head position, etc) and iMovie is just using the same AVFoundation APIs under the scene that you can call manually. Took some notes here if helpful: https://pierce.dev/notes/automating-our-home-video-importsWish vhsdecode was easier to use in practice! Such a cool idea but a bit too inconvenient to hack your own hardware like this...