On and off, over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to record some old home movies we found from my wife’s childhood days–clearly these are treasures that I want to keep to bring up that might come in handy at some point in the future. I figured getting them on my computer and on to some DVDs should be pretty easy given how I’ve done it a few times in the past. I was wrong.

Long ago, I bought an ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 video card and have had it ever since. Early on, I struggled to get its drivers to work reliably and ended up really scared to upgrade to new drivers whenever they came out. I also completely gave up on the applications that came with it (ATI MMC, specifically the TV app). Now that I got these classic home videos (most of them are still in those good old 8mm video tapes) I decided to try to copy them on to my computer so I can eventually put them all on DVDs where they’ll be safer and more accessible. Little did I know how painful this was going to be.

My first attempt involved using my ATI card with Nero Vision. I was able to watch the movies through Nero Vision but as soon as I clicked the ‘record’ button things went downhill quickly. After a few seconds I’d get a dialog that said the recording was stopped because I was trying to duplicate copy protected material. This was clearly not true given the content of these videos but no matter what I tried it wouldn’t allow me to make much progress at all. Same types of issues with Windows Movie Maker.

After searching for any other folks who’ve run into the same dialog I ran into the concept of Macrovision copy protection. It seems that some real studio movies used this form of Macrovision copy protection to deter folks from pirating these movies. That’s all good but for some reason it seems like some old home video cameras seemed to generate the same type of bits in the video stream used in the Macrovision scheme. After searching I was convinced it was my ATI card’s driver (especially given what some sites said though their solution(s) didn’t work for me) so I set out to get a new card/device.

I went out and checked out capture cards/boxes over at the local Circuit City. I ended up buying the Pinnacle USB-500. Long story short, this never worked for me all the way. On all of the apps I tried (Nero Vision, Windows Movie Maker, and Pinnacle Studio) I got partial success but none worked completely. One would play only audio, another would just have video, the other would just crash. At this point I gave up on the Pinnacle.

I dropped by CompUSA yesterday and picked up Hauppauge WinTV-PVR USB2 device. Once again, very similar results. Frustration was peaking. Admittedly, I got it to work once with the Hauppauge app that came with the device but was unable to reproduce that again. It also had all sorts of painting problems too that really just made things even more frustrating (e.g. I could only see the video for a few seconds after I moved the window around. After a few seconds the video always got replaced by some Hauppauge branding image. On top of that, the UI was pretty hard to figure out. At this point I was convinced I was done.

It’s a happy ending though. Last night I decided to give the ATI MMC TV app a try since I hadn’t in years. After downloading and installing the latest video drivers for the card I installed the latest version of MMC (v9.14). It worked. Perfectly. I’m very happy now except for the fact that I’ll now have to sit through recording about 30 tapes. It’s ironic that I probably spent 20-30 hours in all trying different things (cables, devices, drivers, settings, tapes, VCRs, cameras, etc.), spent about $250 on devices that never helped me make any progress, and other frustration just to realize in the end that I already had everything I needed to get a fully working solution if I had just trusted the latest ATI drivers. I guess ATI is back on my good side now.