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Originally Posted by mykalberta
You can get BETA vcr at garage sale and on ebay as well as cleaning tapes - they arent cheap though.
My dad is going through this exact same thing. I bought him something similar.
You will need a fairly descent computer, I would suggest on with a 512MB video card. I got him to buy an bare bones DELL XPS a few years ago when he talked about doing this durring his retirement. It took him a few years to get motivated but now he is going though them like gangbusters.
Key is to plug the USB tuner into a USB 2.0 port. We did a few tests with Vista 1GB Ram and onboard video and the video was very grainy. Upgraded the ram to 4GB put windows 7 on there, was better but still grainy. Bought a 512mb video card and it fixed everything.
He uses that and windows movie maker and he is buring through about 10 tapes a week. Second step is giving Costco his HI8 reels and have them conver them to digital for him and he will cut it using Windows movie maker.
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That sucks that you had to upgrade the hardware so substantially to capture NTSC video. I have that exact tuner stick (re-branded as an Elgato) for the Mac and it works fine on a machine with an integrated GMA950 video chip, doing non-interlaced captures at 60 FPS. I’m surprised at the disparity in requirements.
The Elgato hardware and software is excellent for any macheads looking to do tape conversion (or PVR stuff) on a Mac.