Bring Back MiniDV with This Raspberry Pi FireWire Hat

Digitizing my old tapes was one of the most rewarding side projects that I did over the last year. I managed to get in under the wire (pun intended) of Firewire compatibility on Sequoia and a long daisy-chain of adapters. But it was clear the days of this approach were numbered. I'm optimistic these 3rd party accessories will become more standardized into self-contained cheap boxes where people can easily transfer over their stuff before camcorders degrade.

My pipeline went camera -> dvrescue -> ffmpeg -> clip chunking -> gemini for auto tagging of family members and locations where things were shot.

We now have all our family's footage hosted on a NAS with Jellyfin serving over Tailscale to my parents Macbooks. I found the clip chunking in particular made the footage a lot more watchable than just importing the two-hour long tapes although ymmv.

It would be fun to use this to build something like the old capdiv firewire hdd recorder I have. then you can just capture direct to disk and not worry about the 1:1 transfer time later.

There are 5-12$ firewire to usb adapter cables you can get. no need to use a pi or hat. save money and use any computer.

Any idea how long the tapes will last? I have a bunch sitting in a box that I should probably verify have all been imported already before they turn to dust.

Discussion of prior post (FireWire on a Raspberry Pi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535249

This would have been much nicer than suffering my dad’s 12 year old iMac I found in the loft.

Oooh! Relevant to my interests :-)

I'll have a shot of this I think.

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