It’s time, don’t you think?
Time to digitize all the old 8mm video tapes to preserve them for all eternity. Or at least get them up to the next generation of storage media. Eternity is a bit longer. We’ll deal with that as we go through time.
I took a good look around trying to find the right hardware/software combination that would allow me to stream the video from tapes to my PC. Lots to choose from, but I ended up with the Dazzle DVD Recorder from Best Buy. (I bought it locally because I thought I would probably take it back. Not so!) They have a separate install on their web site for Vista, but I finally got things going.
Holy mega-storage, Batman!
Each 2-hour tape creates one very large video file of approximately 27 GB. In case you’re looking for comparisons, one normal (single-layer) DVD holds 4.7 GB. No, we’re not burning these to DVD. They’ll be on external drives here and off-site – as soon as I buy some more external disk drives.
Here’s a quick snippet from one about 12 years ago. How scary is it that I wore the exact sweatshirt today for the Packers game that I had on in this video?
Cue eerie music. Enjoy.
Hannah’s Teeth:
[youtube uiSi8XDjtQg]