It’s so frustrating. I’m sick of hearing pointless heartbreaking drama. It’s pure greed.

Hey mate! Glad you appreciate my style! I’ve been doing this too long to communicate any other way but straight up, take it or leave it, because I’d rather be on the beach in Hawaii than dealing with all this crap lol!! Cheers mate!

Glad I could help!

I don’t do that, that’s Tim’s dept.

Sounds like you need a head cleaner or a new head or try your luck on another camcorder via eBay

Thanks for the reply ! I appreciate it

You’re welcome!

You’re welcome!

Safe to say I’m sure that factory line closed years ago.

Most customers aren’t willing to pay hardly anything so it has to be an efficient process to keep labor time down.

Have you ever digged into that topic a bit deeper and any information about that? I also was curious about that and searched for information some time ago. But as you said, it's completely uneconomical as you might need a custom made and high speed ADC propably with a FPGA to sample the PAL/NTSC signal with acceptable accuracy. Therefor, I did not found anything usefull that might work out of the box and I'm to busy designing my own ADC/FPGA board ;)

@@OriksonDIY I actually did exactly that and meanwhile I developed my own more or less well functioning prototype software decoder for RF captures of V8/Hi8 tapes :) - the nonlinear filters still need some tuning and audio is not implemented yet but the video quality is already comparable to what comes out of the camera and I could get rid of the cropping artefacts introduced by the built-in TBC. The capture itself is a bit challenging but not much different than traditional capture because that requires the same type of high-speed ADC. You can use the one made by the LD decode guys for a few hundred bucks or use a fast enough SDR dongle or go really cheap and use a modified CX DVB tuner card with a custom driver which allows direct access to the ADC. All that is loosely united under the "VHS-decode" project (fork of LD decode for laser discs) and you can find all the info in the wiki and discord: discord.gg/BfPY3Zca The VHS-decode software is mainly focused on VHS but it works with some other formats including V8/Hi8 but not very well yet, that's why I'm developing my own software which allows for much more tunability (and is faster as well). But RF capturing from camcorders like the one in this video is already quite common and there's good documentation. The camcorders also typically do a reasonably good playback job (apart from some hickups), so you can instantly compare the RF decode quality to the built-in decoder. Definitely check out the VHS-decode wiki (and discord) if you want to get into the fun world of RF capture.

@@RealNovgorod I hate you! :D Don't get this wrong, this is an awesome project, but now I want to give it a try and have to get all the hardware and spend the time to get the perfect RF data ;)

@@OriksonDIY It's a great hobby if you can't afford a boat but want to burn just as much time on fixing it. You might end up in a rabbit hole going all the way through the planet and coming out on the moon. Ironically, it should be a bit easier to get a "good" RF capture as compared to a "good" traditional capture but the software is a hot mess at the moment (well, mine at least). The main philosophy is "capture now, decode later" (and throw more hard drives onto the pile each time) - it's exciting because you can start right away, but also a bit of a gamble of trusting a bunch of disorganized software sleuths and internet autists to eventually come up with a "user friendly" solution which fixes all the issues with the dated and dying decoder hardware... Or you can join the mess and learn how to digitally demodulate a signal, what's nonlinear de-emphasis and how to decode PAL color from a non-standard carrier signal with horrible phase drift - definitely more fun than a boat. Here's a work in progress: i.imgur.com/YnusK1c.png

Dirty or worn or could be the tape. More than likely something up with the camcorder

All depends

Varies. 99.9 isopropyl, chamois tips, small screw driver, steady hand and patience.

Hi! I have no idea, sorry!

Just buy a converter box and digitize it

eBay