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Video Capture hardware software question.

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Hi everybody. I will soon be in the process of transferring all my Hi8/ VHS home movies to my imac. I have seen many capture devices on the market and wanted to get all your opinions on which ones work the best.
They will be connected via composite audio and Svideo from my camcorder and SVHS.


Imac is a 2017 27" 3.8 2TB.

Thx
PG
 

chscag

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Slydude

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Have to agree with Charlie. Unless you are going to be doing a lot of tis and want to spend more money that's probably your best bet.

If you look at siime ofr the cheaper usb devices make sure the vendor has a good return policy. I bought one off of Amazon that was supposed to be Mac compatable. When I got the thing and tried to make it work it was a no go from the start. After multiple reinstalls and trying every trick I knoew zi contacted tech support via email.

Tech support's response, reminiscent of a bad translation of Chinese to English, was to reinstall the software Under OS 10.6. Sorry, been there done that before I contacted you. Their next response IIRC was to use a Windoows box. The thing was cheap so it wasn't worth the hassle of a return.
 
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Just as an aside, if you or any pals have a camcorder that allows connection from a vcr and has a say FireWire out you have all you need to transfer. I transferred a bunch of old vcr tapes this way. Those older camcorders are near worthless these days.
 

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Good point. I didn't think of that as an option.

Some of the older TiVo units could also be used if anyone has one of those lying around. I know it worked with the Series 2 units and probably works with later ones as well. The process was time consuming, and somewhat convoluted, but it did work. The picture quality wasn't noticeably worse than the source video tape IIRC.
 
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It’s funny, I rarely see this method mentioned anywhere, but those things are dime a dozen now in thrift shops. (At least here anyway)

The old days I had a miro card capture in my beige G3 and I used it a ton. The good old days of desktops and many useful internal slots :)
 

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