Hi8 Tape to PC hard drive

[Sledge]

Any idea as to the best way to transfer my collection of home movies from hi8 camcorder tape onto my pc hard drive and then to cd?

[Capt. Horrendous]

You'll need to get an analogue video capture card plus some leads to run from your camera to it. Providing you have a cd writer, some video editing software along with burning software such as Nero you can make VCD or SVCD discs which will play on your DVD player.

[Background Noise]

You might already have the capture hardware (?) - I can suck analogue footage into my PC through my TV card. You'll need some software as Capt H said but if your movies are already editted it won't need to be too fantastic, just good enough to capture. Win XP has movie editor built in. Either way you'll need to convert the captured stuff to mpg format and then Nero and Adaptec will make VCDs. Having said that, if you just want to view them on your PC, the raw mpg files will be fine. (AVIs - the format it's captured in - would work too but are very big). I think there are DVD players available now which will play mpg files.