Hello -

My well-loved cousin recently passed away in a car accident and I want
to send my relatives some video clips of him.

I am looking for some way to transfer portions of 8mm recordings to
something viewable in Europe.  At this point I'm not too sure what they
have in terms of viewing equipment.  I think sending a CD would be a
safe bet.

Here in Canada, I am able to view the 8mm films via my video recorder
which I plug into AV1 of my LCD TV.

I also have a PC plug in the back of this TV so I connect my laptop,
but what hardware / software do I need to perform the transfer?

Thanks in advance.

Trizi wrote:

We use old ladies who rhytmically whip an array of colorful pig bladders
with their broomsticks.

Sounds old-fashioned to me.

(No, really. Everyone and their dog has a DVD player, except some old
people might not - in which case they probably have a VHS VCR.)

Sending a an ordinary video DVD, burned on DVD-R media, would probably
be safer.

Differing video standards (PAL vs NTSC) used to be a problem in the
past, but these days you can even send an NTSC disc. Most of the current
PAL video/tv equipment is multistandard, or able to do a standards
conversion on the fly. So there is generally no need to worry about
standards conversion any more.

(Even European VHS VCRs - given a reasonably modern tv set and a VCR -
will usually handle NTSC tapes.)

You need a video capture device of some sort. You also need DVD
authoring software (preferably with a built-in MPEG-2 encoder so that
you don't have to purchase that component separately). Finally, you need
a DVD writer.

There are various video capture devices on the market which come bundled
with this sort of software. For example - and I'm not endorsing this
particular product in any way since I have not used it myself - "Roxio
Easy Media Creator 8 Deluxe" comes with a Dazzle-branded video capture
device:

<http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/creator/creator.html>

You can learn more about video capturing and DVD authoring here (see the
links on the sidebar):

<http://www.videohelp.com/>

Or, if all that seems like too much of a hassle, you could buy a
stand-alone DVD recorder. See <http://www.dvdrecorderworld.com/>.

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