by: icyfox

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&#x27;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.<p>My pipeline went camera -&gt; dvrescue -&gt; ffmpeg -&gt; clip chunking -&gt; gemini for auto tagging of family members and locations where things were shot.<p>We now have all our family&#x27;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.

4/1/2026, 5:17:26 AM