My MiniDV digital camcorder died a couple of years ago, it no longer played the tapes or recorded properly. Which was a shame as I had several hours of video I had no way of viewing, some of it was backed up to VHS but not all of it and in 2002 I didn’t have a powerful enough PC to capture the video. To get it repaired was going to be costly so I never got it done, so that was that. Until this week when I decided I wanted to see some of these videos again and I found out that MiniDV camcorders are stupidly cheap now, for little more than £100 I bought a decent camera with a DV Firewire output which means I can play and capture the videos! OK, I now have two camcorders (I already have a HDD one which I use) but I’m sure I’ll find some use for it.

So I’ll be spending some happy evenings backing up all the tapes to AVI and then onto DVD.

You can see my first capture in the Movies section.