Best way to digitize 8mm tapes?

Message

bpaddock · Post by **bpaddock** » Sun Nov 24, 2013 3:59 pm

On August 7th my wife committed suicide, see http://www.kpaddock.com for details on how chronic pain drives someone to this.

She left behind several dozen 8mm video tapes that she had taken of family events and such.

As you know 8mm is not a common format anymore. I'd like to get these on to a DVD or a BlueRay disk.
So I either need a card to digitize these for my AMD64 box or find a service that can do this for me.
I feel, right now at least, it would be to painful to spend hours and hours editing this stuff (what is good Linux video editing software?).

I just want to get this onto an archive grade disk (recommendations for those?) to reduce the volume of 'stuff' with as little effort as possible.

So what cards or service can get this done?

eyoung100 · Post by **eyoung100** » Mon Nov 25, 2013 6:17 pm

Wal-Mart does this, and I'm sorry for your loss. I offer my condolences.

HolgerB · Post by **HolgerB** » Thu Nov 28, 2013 1:43 pm

I am sorry for the loss of your wife ! In regard to your questions it seems to me that you do not want to spent too many time editing those videos, right ?

Beside using a transfer service the monetary cheap way would be buying a used Haupauge hardware encoding device (like a PVR150 PCI card or a PVR USB2 USB device). After installing the ivtv tools you can pretty much simply do a cat /dev/video0 > myfile.mpg for capturing. They really sell very cheaply:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/hauppauge-wintv ... 2c7780c933
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hauppauge-WinTV ... 4acc8b4f78

This being said you could even use every old analogue TV card with composite / S-VHS in and capture to any codec of your choice with Mencoder.

For editing I would use AVIDemux in copy mode which works fine for MPEG2 if you cut at I-frames.

MPEG2 has the benefit that you can master DVDs out of it or simply play it back from a PC.

HTH,
Holger

szatox · Post by **szatox** » Sun Dec 08, 2013 4:47 pm

I see 2 ways to get it done. One is TV card in your PC, the other is modern TV that allows recording. And both ways require a lot of patience, since tapes will take their time.

Definitely DONT use CD/DVD or similar to store your data, current writable disks grow old within a year. Get either HDD or SSD, which one is better deppends on how much you want to spend and what damage you expect it to suffer. I'd go for double HDD, since they are cheap and don't age. And 2 are unlikely to break down at the same time when being in use

Jaglover · Post by **Jaglover** » Sun Dec 08, 2013 4:53 pm

I'm using archival grade DVD's and can't complain.