You may also want to consider the possibility of losing your stuff in transit or having it damaged in the hands of courier service providers. Other MiniDV playback devices in this category are; Sony DSR-V10 mini-DV Player Recorder, Panasonic AG-DV2000 mini-DV Player Recorder, JVC HR-DVS2U Mini-DV/S-VHS VCR Combo, etc. The average turnaround time is 2-3 weeks, but it might take longer depending on the service and the amount of media you need to convert. Check if the footage is successfully captured on the device, and then you can transfer it to other devices for editing or sharing. After the played footage ends, press stop on both the camcorder and capturing device.

If your system is a Desktop computer system, the best thing to do is to buy a Firewire card to install. On a laptop, just check if your laptop model has an Express Card slot or a PCMCIA slot. Today, most laptops have memory card readers to support the latest high-definition cameras and camcorders. Since the tape is an analog device, the process of transferring data from it is mechanical.

Can you Convert FireWire to USB?

It supports playback and recording in both Standard Play and Long Play modes. Current video-capturing or converter devices are easy to use and offer high-quality footage capture. Inside the device settings, find the video source and set it on AV (double-check the setting is applied). Select S-Video in the source if you have an S-Video cable connection instead of an AV to RCA.

Future-Proofing Digital Images and Videos

Read more about minidv camcorder tapes to digital here.

Get this player if you have a mix of Video8, Hi8 and Digital8 8mm video cassettes. Feel free to read the reviews before committing to an 8mm video cassette player purchase.

i.LINK cable / FireWire

If you have mini-sized tapes (called VHS-C tapes), you might need a camcorder rather than a VCR. There are also adapters that let you insert those old VHS-C tapes into an ordinary VCR. Consequently, your best bet for finding a VCR is to buy one from an online auction at eBay. Here, you can browse a large selection of used VCRs and pick one that, based on the photos and description, looks likely to work. If you’re persistent, though, you’ll land a VCR that works well enough to play, rewind and eject tapes. The unit comes with a Firewire port (IEEE 1394 /i.LINK), S-Video in/out, Composite in/out and there’s support for headphones. You transfer video from your Video8 tape via the composite or RCA outputs at the rear end of the player.

On the other hand, professional services save you from technical mistakes , buying old players and camcorders. After you save your converted videos to digital files, make sure they’re a part of your computer’s regular backup or put a copy of them in a cloud service like Dropbox or OneDrive. After you go through all the trouble of converting your videotapes, you wouldn’t want to lose them to a failed hard drive or broken computer. The video content in MiniDV tape is in analog format, which you cannot play with computers, smartphones, tablets, TV boxes, HDTV, etc. To convert the MiniDV data to a digital format like MP4, you must transfer it to a digital environment like the computer. From the computer, you can convert the data to different formats, including DVD format. This article focuses on how to convert the MiniDV tapes to digital files without Camcorder.