Capture old 8mm video recording on Android tv

by Aelarn

Hello all First of all, I really hope my post does not violate rules and does not involve illegal topics, but I really am inexperienced about this kind of topics.

Long story short, we found some old 8mm tapes of old family events, and we managed to connect the (barely functional) camcorder and show them in our tcl Android TV, using the coaxial cable (antenna cable). We would really like to capture the recordings in digital format, and I was wondering if there is any type of apps/software tool for screen capturing from the TV.

In a sense, I'd expect that such tool wouldn't exist, since otherwise people could record from antenna anything that is received, but again I don't really know much about the field and maybe such tools exist and they block pirating proprietary content via encryption. I'm not even 100% sure this is the right place to ask, but any help/suggestion would be appreciated.

Thanks a lot in any case!

sivartk

You need a USB capture card / device and a PC.

dark-ermac

Maybe some screen recorder app?

justsleeponit

2 or 3 years ago I put some effort to convert my old 8mm tapes to digital files. First I bought a cheap USB capture card but the quality disappointed me. If I played right from the camcorder to the TV, the quality was noticeably better than the captured/converted digital files played on the TV. Then I bought a expensive USB adapter (I think it was from Elgato) and again I was disappointed. There was almost no difference.

This can be sufficient to you and most people. To me it wasn't. After some research I found that the best way to achieve the best possible quality was to buy some specific SONY Digital8 camcorders that were released in the early 00's that had digital tracking (for Hi8/8mm) and digital output (Firewire). I bought a used one and a firewire cable and captured the video on my macbook. The quality was very good, clearly noticeable difference. Of course, within the technical limitations of the old format.