Bring Back MiniDV with This Raspberry Pi FireWire Hat

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/minidv-with-raspberry-pi-firewire-hat/

by ingve • 4 months ago

125 29 4 months ago

icyfox3• 4 months ago

Digitizing my old tapes was one of the most rewarding side projects that I did over the last year. I managed to get in under the wire (pun intended) of Firewire compatibility on Sequoia and a long daisy-chain of adapters. But it was clear the days of this approach were numbered. I'm optimistic these 3rd party accessories will become more standardized into self-contained cheap boxes where people can easily transfer over their stuff before camcorders degrade.

My pipeline went camera -> dvrescue -> ffmpeg -> clip chunking -> gemini for auto tagging of family members and locations where things were shot.

We now have all our family's footage hosted on a NAS with Jellyfin serving over Tailscale to my parents Macbooks. I found the clip chunking in particular made the footage a lot more watchable than just importing the two-hour long tapes although ymmv.

romanhn• 4 months ago

Went through a very similar journey recently as well. In my case using a Macbook was a non-starter, as certain adapters are prohibitively expensive these days, if you can even get your hands on one. Thankfully my son has a desktop Windows PC and Firewire PCI cards are cheap and plentiful, so getting connected that way worked out. Much better than an earlier attempt via RCA cables (simple but digital -> analog -> digital is not the way to go).

My pipeline was camera -> WinDV -> DVdate (to extract exact datetimes into srt subtitles) -> Handbrake (to convert to mp4).

eisa01• 4 months ago

I am going to finish such a project soon myself, including some old Video8 tapes! Sounds like you're on macOS, Any reason you didn't use iMovie for the capture itself?

The Video8 tapes have already been digitalized via a Digital8 camcorder, but apparently you can get even better quality out of old analog tapes with the vhsdecode project. Let's see if I ever get around to that, but at least it bypass Firewire entirely: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://www.reddit.com/r/vhsdecode/

icyfox3• 4 months ago

Mostly wanted to fully automate the pipeline (auto-rewind tape, scan tape head position, etc) and iMovie is just using the same AVFoundation APIs under the scene that you can call manually. Took some notes here if helpful: https://pierce.dev/notes/automating-our-home-video-imports

Wish vhsdecode was easier to use in practice! Such a cool idea but a bit too inconvenient to hack your own hardware like this...

ErroneousBosh2• 4 months ago

If you are capturing I find dvgrab is pretty good. It's what I've been using for about 25 years now!

In the olden days when I got paid to shoot real video on a VX2000 and edit it for people, captured using a PCI Firewire card and dvgrab in Slackware, rewrapped with probably mencoder shading towards ffmpeg when it became more popular (and developed!), dual-boot into Windows 2000 and cut in Premiere 5.0, then back into Linux to transcode back to DV if I wanted to write it out to DV tape.

These days I shoot on a PD150 or DSR500 (and quite often some HDV cameras), capture via a PCIe Firewire card and dvgrab in Ubuntu, rewrap with ffmpeg, and edit in Resolve, without the dual-booting step.

If you use dvgrab it will split the capture up into separate clips on shot boundaries based on the pause/unpause markers on the tape. I have not found a way to extract good/no good from the stream, but if you're not shooting on a broadcast camera you don't have this anyway. Timecode is preserved though!

When you load it all up in Resolve, one of the options in the Cut page is "Source Tape View" which runs all your clips together by timecode, and lets you view them as though they were a continuous tape of your rushes, which is how we used to do basic assemble editing in the olden days of clunky tape decks and edit controllers with big rows of red 7-segment displays.

Edit your old home videos. You can do that now, and they'll be far more watchable.

polishdude20• 4 months ago

A few years ago I did a bit more of a crude flow.

Play the footage on a tv in a dark room. Place a 4k camera on a tripod and record the tv with audio into the camera audio port.

Worked perfectly.

Melatonic4• 4 months ago

Actually not a terrible way to go from interlaced to progressive footage. Depending on the TV and camera

vardump2• 4 months ago

Is it possible to accomplish tagging with local AI instead of Gemini?

icyfox3• 4 months ago

As far as I've seen, local OSS video understanding models just really aren't there yet. I briefly looked at facial recognition models but a good amount of signal was actually in the video's audio instead of the raw video frames. Depends on the accuracy you're looking for at the end of the day.

shevy-java• 4 months ago

Digitizing my old tapes was one of the most rewarding side projects

I also wanted to do that, but then I realised I needed to invest more time and may need some hardware, so one day I simply had enough, went to a commercial shop and had them turn all the old stuff into digital. The cost wasn't that huge either, so considering that I could also save time (doing it myself), I am ok with that investment. Hopefully the future has digital everywhere. Storage to be cheaper too, ideally.

sorenjan• 4 months ago

Can you expand on the Gemini tagging part? What did you do with the tags, import them into Jellyfin after cutting the videos into parts?

cromka• 4 months ago

gemini for auto tagging of family members

With all respect, reading this part made me feel uneasy.

Denatonium3• 4 months ago

I used dvgrab to ingest my old tapes, and ffmpeg and avisynth/QTGMC to de-interface and encode files for easy viewing (though I keep the original .dv files).

The biggest issue I ran into was that while the audio and video were properly synced up in the original .dv file (due to it being an interleaved format), when I re-encoded the videos, the audio and video would drift out of sync as the video went on.

I was able to fix the sync issues by using dvgrab to split the original dv file into a bunch of 3 minute chunks. I then wrote a script to extract the audio track from each chunk, pad the end of the audio with milliseconds of silence to the exact length of the video track, combine the padded audio tracks, encodes the combined track, and muxes the fixed audio track with the encoded video. This worked really well; the silence padding is imperceptible, but the audio and video are still in sync - even after 2 hours.

A final point that needs making is that doing anything with dv files in ffmpeg (even -c:v copy) destroys the SMPTE timecodes embedded in the original file, making it much harder to split by scene.

CountHackulus• 4 months ago

Just because I've dealt with this exact issue in the past, it may have been a 30fps vs 29.97fps issue. For me the audio was a fixed length, but the frame rate was SLIGHTLY too fast. The problem can manifest as either too slow or too fast depending on which side is expecting 30fps vs 29.97fps.

Melatonic4• 4 months ago

Transcode to another format first that keeps the timecode?

EvanAnderson• 4 months ago

Discussion of prior post (FireWire on a Raspberry Pi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535249

ErroneousBosh2• 4 months ago

Oooh! Relevant to my interests :-)

I'll have a shot of this I think.

bdavbdav• 4 months ago

This would have been much nicer than suffering my dad’s 12 year old iMac I found in the loft.

criddell• 4 months ago

Any idea how long the tapes will last? I have a bunch sitting in a box that I should probably verify have all been imported already before they turn to dust.

eej71• 4 months ago

My experience so far is that the tapes themselves are fine - but the required hardware/technology stack to extricate them is the real question mark.

Melatonic4• 4 months ago

Probably longer than whatever you capture them to!

haxtormoogle• 4 months ago

There are 5-12$ firewire to usb adapter cables you can get. no need to use a pi or hat. save money and use any computer.

mmmlinux2• 4 months ago

You mean the ones on amazon that are just random ends on a cable? Yeah, don't plug that in to your computer or camera.

mike50• 4 months ago

Unless there has been some change recently those have never had the bandwidth or software support needed to capture DV.

mmmlinux2• 4 months ago

It would be fun to use this to build something like the old capdiv firewire hdd recorder I have. then you can just capture direct to disk and not worry about the 1:1 transfer time later.

Bring Back MiniDV with This Raspberry Pi FireWire Hat

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