Recording TV screen through MiniDisplay?

[Virgo]

I have a MiniDisplay to HDMI adapter + an HDMI cable + an HDTV. My question is, if I hook up my old camcorder to the TV via the AV cable it came with and play the camcorder vid, is there a way to capture what is playing on the screen onto my MacBook Pro?

 

[fpnc]

If your camcorder supports some form of passthrough for digital video over Firewire then you can use that to capture the video (you'd connect the camcorder via Firewire to the MacBook). Otherwise, you'll need an analog video capture device like the EyeTV. The standard video ports on the MacBook Pro are for video output only (i.e. you can't use the MacBook's Mini DisplayPort as a video input to directly record video).

 

[evil_santa]

Ive done this with the DVImin to SD video adapter & FW DV camera, works ok but limited to PAL / NTSC resolution. You might be better of with screen capture software.

I think the way you have describes the TV probably wont down convert to PAL/NTSC on the AV output.

 

[Virgo]

I'm not sure if my camcorder supports FireWire, unless there's some complicated adapter setup that I dont know about. It's an old Sony handy cam ccd trv 308 from 2002 (uses hi8 tapes). I don't want to shell out that much money on an EyeTV because I just want to grab my home videos and place them on my laptop and get rid of the hideous camera.. Kind of a one-time use type of thing.

 

[initialsBB]

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hi8 is analog video, so that won't work with a digital interface like DVI or DP. Digital8 uses the same hi8 tapes to record DV, and since that's digital you'll have a FireWire port.

 

[Virgo]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

hi8 is analog video, so that won't work with a digital interface like DVI or DP. Digital8 uses the same hi8 tapes to record DV, and since that's digital you'll have a FireWire port.

Thanks for your help. I'm not very A/V savvy, but these are the ports that I have available on the camcorder:

So are any of these FireWire? Or capable of connecting to MBP somehow?

 

[cgbier]

No and no**

**You can use video converters ($50-5,000) my favorite is from Grass Valley/Canopus. No drivers needed and works natively in video apps.

 

[ftaok]

Another method to get your Hi8 footage onto a computer for editing is using a DVD-recorder. These were pretty common a few years ago. Plug your camcorder to the DVD recorder using composite and burn a DVD. Then stick the DVD into the Mac and rip/convert the footage to your favorite format.

You'd lose some image quality, but if you have access to a DVD recorder, then it's a quick and dirty way to get the footage.

Alternatively, if you have (or know someone with) a miniDV camcorder, you could use it as a DV bridge and import the footage directly into iMovie (in DV format).

A little less common is a Digital8 camcorder; in this set-up, you'd put the Hi8 tape into the Digital8 camcorder and import over Firewire.