Dug out an old Panasonic video tape camera, and found a tape with nearly an hour of film that has never been transferred to a PC. Current PC is a laptop, the only connection being USB. Played the tape via the TV using a lead with 4 way mini jack on camera end and three phono (RCA) plugs on the other, into SCART on the TV, using an adaptor.
How do I connect the camera directly to the PC, or, more to the point, do I need one of these :
Camera is Panasonic nv-ds15b
Thanks!
I don't know what the link goes to, but of curse you need some kind of video grabber system, unless you want to do the horrible point a camera at the tv screen transfer! One issue you used to find with home made videos is the erratic sync pulses due to the mechanics, which can make the results a little wobbly to say the least so many of these devices contain some memory so the data can be read out with no variations it being buffered in the unit. Whether times have changed and things are now more capable I do not know. Of course there are a number of services out there which can do it for you and put it onto a dvd or even a big drive or ramstick if that is your wish. Brian
Yes something like that, a neighbour of my parents wanted device to capture videos, I recommended he buy this one
I generally find startech products to be good.
Excellent, thank you. That'll do.
I have one of the Chinese clones of this. From Ebay and it works well.
In message snipped-for-privacy@binnsroad.myzen.co.uk>, Graeme snipped-for-privacy@nospam.demon.co.uk> writes
I forked out and got one of those (it's £39.95!). I haven't used it very much, but it works very well indeed.
There are others that are similar and much cheaper (Easycap, EZcap and variants), and also work well - but there was a time when there were some fake copies on sale, and it was pot luck whether they really worked properly.
Back in the 80s/90s EU laws prohibited video-out from imported camcorders to protect the European VCR market - ie Philips & Grundig. (I think there's still a 30-minute record limit on digital cameras in Europe).
To comply the Japanese makers simply covered up the video-out ports on the camcorder and disabled the output in firmware. But if you were brave, on many models (certainly on my Sony Video8 and Hi8's) you could drill a hole to expose the video-out socket and enable it with a hack.
D'oh ignore me. That was video *in* to use the camcorder as a VCR.
IIRC the 30 minute limit on doing video with an ordinary digital camera is to save them being subjected to some sort of customs tarriff for "genuine" video cameras.
Just checking; do you have FireWire output from the camera?
Allegedly you can get converters from FireWire to USB.
Cheers
Dave R
I bought a cheapy one like
and it was fine, even worked with Linux.
This is the one I use:
It came with software that displays the video from my VHS player in a small window on my PC without needing the TV. Start recording at the appropriate point, and there is a timer to stop automatically after some time so you don't have to watch over the process. Then use the software to edit the recording and save to one of many formats. I favour .mp4 as it results in a file about 10% the size of the initial one, with unnoticeable loss of quality if you choose suitable parameters.
Ditto:
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