Home Videos on Tivo

[c monkey]

How can I place home videos onto my Tivo box... or my PC for that matter?

I don't even know if it is possible since my home videos aren't digital; they are on the small tapes (I think they are called Hi8 or something similar to that).

Would there be a way of converting my home videos (on tape) to go onto my PC or Tivo. The main reason I want this is to be able to put these onto DVDs. Any help would leave me in your gratitude.

Thanks.

[dwgsp]

Yes, it is possible to do this. Here's a brief description of what I do:

First you need to determine the format of your home videos. Hi8 is an analog format, so if that is indeed what you have you'll need to obtain a video capture card or system (such as made by Hauppauge) for your computer, install the software that came it with on your computer, connect your camcorder to the video capture system, and then play the tape while "capturing" a digital version of the video on your computer.

My capture card included software that creates an mpeg format video file, which is quite handy since otherwise I would have to convert the file to mpeg. I then use a program called VideoReDo to edit the video. Then I transfer the edited mpeg file to my Tivo.

It helps that my capture system produces mpeg in a format that is directly compatible with my TiVo, so I don't have to mess around with converting formats. It think that it cost about $100. There are probably less expensive systems on the market, but I liked the fact that my system does the mpeg capture in hardware, so I don't need a really fast compuetr to get very satisfactory results.

[FandL]

Looks like this is a little late, but what the heck.

I just hook my video camera into the cable connector on the tivo, then tell the tivo to record however long and use the camera to play the video to the tivo. Didn't have to buy anything.

[c monkey]

Looks like this is a little late, but what the heck.

I just hook my video camera into the cable connector on the tivo, then tell the tivo to record however long and use the camera to play the video to the tivo. Didn't have to buy anything.


So would I just connect the AV wires from my camera to the back of the input on the back of the tivo? Sounds siplme enough (if I'm getting it right), I'll give it a shot.