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I've been using an old capture card to digitize my family's collection of VHS tapes, a collection that spans two decades. Our home videos, however, were recorded using a Hi8 8 mm camcorder, and most of the cassettes were never transferred to VHS format. The few tapes that were converted consist almost entirely of videos from when my siblings and I were very young.
I told my parents about this problem, and they searched their house for a camcorder that could play the tapes. They were able to find three; one wouldn't power on at all and another had a jammed tape drive, but the third camera was indeed still able to play cassettes. They agreed to let me borrow the camera; I also went home with four boxes of Hi8 cassettes.
Each tape can hold about two hours of video, so I'm looking at a few hundred hours of content. That will of course take a lot of space on my NAS. But the project is worth it to me; if I need to add more storage to my pool, I will do it, if it means I can get all the cassettes digitized in the process.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]