Like the cliche says…We live in a digital age. I’m generally all about using things like email, software, and web sites to make my life easier (OK…I’ll admit that sometimes they make my life more complicated!). I have Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook accounts. Unfortunately, I grew up in a not-so-digital age and there are volumes of legacy media like photographs, 8mm home movies, VHS tapes, etc. These are treasures that beg to be converted to digital formats to allow for easy sharing and protect them from decay and the ravages of time.

Ironically…years ago my Aunt Anne and her husband, Rick spent many hours with a VHS Camcorder and tape player in front of a movie screen recording the bulk of my Grandparent’s legacy 8mm home movies….to the same end. You can just imagine the questions my 13 year old had when he first saw one of these tapes: “What’s that noise in the background?” (referring to the click-clack of the movie projector as it played on). “What is that weird music?…why is there no sound?” (Anne set the movies to some of my grandparent’s favorite big band era favorites). Remember…this is a kid that has always had DVDs, the Internet, digital music, etc. The best way I could explain it to him was that it was like a telesync - a video copy of a movie shot in a cinema with a camcorder by bootleggers!

So my first of many attempts in this arena was to digitize these VHS tapes. My goal was to accomplish this by utilizing my existing equipment (read: without spending extra money). I no longer own a VCR, so I had to borrow one. After consulting with my life coach, Google….Bingo! I found couple of web sites that explained how you could use your digital camcorder as a pass-through device to capture the video digitally:

http://www.techlore.com

http://pcworld.about.com/news/May142002id97624.htm

But alas, this solution was not to be had. My Digital Camcorder was a little long in the tooth and didn’t have input capability. A call to my brother to borrow his newer device proved fruitless as well, as his camcorder was suffering from a chronic firewire connection problem.

At this point I had 3 options:

1. Beg, Borrow (Steal?) a friend or relatives device
2. Purchase either a new camcorder or A to D converter ($$$$)
3. Find a creative solution to my problem.

I opted for # 3 of course.

I thought about several solutions and even contemplated getting in the truck for a trip to Fry’s Electronics. Then I remembered that the Media Center PC that I built a few years ago has a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 MCE card installed, which happens to have both composite and S-video inputs. I never used any of the add-on software that came with the card, so I tried installing several of the applications on the OEM CD. The one program I thought would be most helpful would not install….it had some obscure memory error that I just didn’t feel like troubleshooting.

So here is what I did:

1. Reconfigured Media Center settings to “trick” the Media Center PC into thinking it had an external set top box with an S-video input.
2. Connected the VCR to the TV card input.
3. Started the VCR and recorded in Media Center.

After recording the content, I used the Videora iPod Converter (just a front end for ffmpeg) with a custom conversion profile to convert the dvr-ms files (they land in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Recorded TV) to h.264 compressed mpeg-4 files. From there the sneaker net got them onto my mac via an external HDD.

So now I’m knee-deep in editing this footage in iMovie ‘08.