Not happy with video quality delivered by converters such as EasyCap? Or maybe you don’t have any, and still want to capture quality AV signal (eg. from an old VHS)?
Your old miniDV camcorder may be helpful.

Around 20 years ago, most digital cameras had their recordings transfered to PC’s using FireWire connection. In case some of you have never heard of it – let me explain quickly. Back in the days, when USB 2.0 hadn’t been developed yet, FireWire offered hi-speed data transfer, useful in accesing external hard drives and stuff we’re talking about – cameras. Before decent compression types came into life, movie files used lots of disk space. So, copying tape with your recordings to computers (yes, it was done in real time) couldn’t manage with USB and other standards.

Why am I talking about all of that? Well, that’s the second thing you’ll need (considering camcorder itself as the primary one) – an FireWire connection. Usually there are two posibilities – either get an old computer (usually from 2000’s) or buy appropiate PCI card, which should be compatibile with most modern PC’s. If you have all the stuff I’ve been talking about – that’s where AV capturing comes in.

You see, many camcorders except for copying miniDV tapes (which is pretty obvious), allows to connect external video source (usually with composite AV minijack). With one plugged in, you can transfer analog image and sound to digital. And as I said before – mpeg wasn’t so common back then, so you get decent, high-bitrate .AVI signal – which is better than most cheap coverters! (they often use old mpeg1/2 formats).

So you connect your source (eg. VHS player) to camera (usually RCA to minijack cable) and camera to PC (Firewire cable). There is a lot of diffrent software you can use – don’t worry, as soon as it doesn’t compress the data (as WMP does) – it doesn’t matter which one you use (in my case it’s Premiere Pro 2.0). Now, after setting “AV capture” option in your camera – just press record in your software and wait till all you wanted gets digitized. Done!