r/MiniDV

Hey all, my grandfather recently gave me his old Canon MV600i miniDV camcorder. I can't find much info on the model, aside from the user manual it came with and that it was introduced in 2003. It (suprisingly) has a still working li-ion battery. I have a DSLR but have never really gotten into camcorders. Does anyone know if this is a good model of camcorder, and any problems it may have?

The one problem I've noticed is that when it is turned on cold, the image produces a faint, stretched image, but after a while it fixes itself. Looks to me like a capacitor problem but I don't really know how I'd go about fixing that.

There's a 60 min tape inside that has some old videos that I want to transfer to my computer. Does anybody know how I might go about that? I read the manual, and it looks like I need a MiniDV FireWire socket to USB adaptor, if that exists? The other questions is finding software I could use- coming from 2003 the software is heinously outdated. If anyone knows of any modern software I could use to get it to work, it would mean a lot.

Thanks in advance 🙏

Further to my damaged hard drives and having to re-capture many MiniDV tapes, mentioned here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniDV/comments/1vawlaz/old_project_hard_drives_bad_minidv_tapes_still/

I bought an old i7 Dell laptop with firewire off eBay, and tested and successfully captured with WinDV.

WinDV is a bit old and has some flaws (introduction of a dot in the naming, etc.) so I used AI and re-created the functionality and added some more.

Now also have a 1-click capture which:

• Checks that the DV device, tape, capture folder, and disk space are OK.
• Rewinds the tape.
• Plays briefly and establish a reliable PAL/NTSC signal lock.
• Rewinds again and prepare the capture graph.
• Plays and captures the entire tape continuously.
• Continues through blank/unrecorded sections rather than prematurely assuming the tape has ended.
• Stops automatically at physical end-of-tape.
• Finalizes the AVI, set the MiniDV recording date, run scene detection and DV/error analysis.
• Rewinds the tape when everything is finished.

Here's what it currently looks like (see picture).

I'd post to github, but have no idea how, and not sure I'd want to learn right now. If there's enough interest, I might consider it though.

Got too tired of using a Windows VM so I built my own app using ClaudeCode... and it works! My camera is a Panasonic NV-GS320, I know there's a few of these that let you digitize directly through USB, but probably a few of you have trouble doing it in macOS. Per Claude, here's an AI explanation:

"Turns out the reason is that the camera speaks an obscure-but-real part of the USB Video Class spec (VS_FORMAT_DV) that a handful of mid-2000s camcorders support, and basically nothing except Windows' generic driver stack ever bothered to implement it. So I reverse-engineered the USB protocol directly (isochronous transfer capture, UVC descriptor parsing, frame reassembly) and built a small native macOS app around it:

• Connects straight to the camera over USB, no capture card, no FireWire, no VM
• Live preview while the tape plays, before you even hit record
• Captures the raw DV stream (video + embedded audio, bit-exact) and encodes it to ProRes 422 HQ
• Automatically detects when you stopped and started recording on the tape (reading the camera's own REC-START flag embedded in the DV data) and splits the capture into a separate file per shot — toggleable if you'd rather just get one continuous file
• A little Photo Booth-style filmstrip shows each detected shot with a thumbnail as it captures
• Optional 4K upscale on export (2880×2160, plain scale, no AI) — native tape resolution stays the default

Camera compatibility, to be upfront about it: the USB descriptor scanning is generic — it looks for any connected camera advertising this UVC DV-streaming mode, not just mine — but I've only been able to test it against my own NV-GS320. If your camera exposes the same USB feature, it should be picked up automatically; if it doesn't work, USB traffic logs from your camera would actually be genuinely useful for extending support."

So yeah, whoever this could work for give it a try and let me know! Would be happy to update it to try and make it work for your camera.

Edit: App updated! Now you can choose between RAW DV, ProRes or H.264 (or all three!) plus additional 4k rescaling (not upscaling).

Source + download: https://github.com/peperinho-dev/minidv-capture

ALSO: If anyone is interested in me integrating FireWire, please refer to this issue in the GitHub: https://github.com/peperinho-dev/minidv-capture/issues/1

PS: Yes I'm spanish 😭

Anybody know what I could do to potentially stop this vcr from eating my tapes? I ran a few tapes through seemed good then on the third it completely messed up the tape. I had operate surgery on my tape and cut out the ruined parts then reassemble the miniDV tape to save it! Don’t wanna go through that again 😩

I hadn't thought about this thing in years until this subreddit came up in my feed. I purchased this back in 2005 before my daughter was born with the intention to get really decent video quality of her formative years.

The video quality of consumer level cameras was quite bad and I wanted something that would show colors well.

I believe the Sony's at the time were considered better, but Panasonic was a close second. I got the second from the top and was extremely happy with the video quality.

I checked a video one time but the video didn't record properly. I assumed the camera had gone bad and packed it away. thinking it was now defective.

Being recommended this subreddit caused me to pull it out of storage and on a whim I fired it up. I guess the tape was bad because this thing works great, so I'm super happy about that.

I recently found a Sony high eight 460 zoom camera at a thrift store it records fine onto tape with Great audio on playback but for my mini DVR tape was set up the audio comes out very low quality. I leave for college in a week and a half and would like to have this sorted before college. What can I buy or do to fix this situation?

As a heads up the only place I can plug a chord into is through a 3.5 jack, s video out, and 2.5 mm jack

My camcorder screen was black so I opened it up and reattached the ribbon cable, but when I powered it back on this happened 😭😭

now the screen works but there are massive black and white splotches on the screen. how do I fix this?

The HDV format was originally developed by JVC and then supported by Sony, Canon & Sharp. During the development of this format, JVC introduce the HD10U in 2004 (I think the Japanese version of this thing: the GR-HD1 & the Korean version: the GR-HD1KR) which release in late 2003) - which considered as the first HDV camcorder ever made (even though the camcorder didn't have a HDV logo or HDMI (the camcorder itself using Component or FireWire (IEEE 1394) to output 720p)) rather than later models made for consumers by Sony & Canon, which did including a HDMI port & 1080i video recording.

Although the HD10U/GR-HD1 is the 1st gen HDV camcorder, the video quality is still impressive even in today's standard btw.

Thank you!

Hey guys, I was checking out this handycam because I want to get one with the retro look, not that much of a crappy quality and night vision and this camcorder ticks all the boxes. The seller says that it doesn’t record and it just shows a black screen when putting it on recording mode. Is there a way to fix it and get a good camcorder for this price?

Hi,
I build a MiniDV firewire recorder using a rasperry pi 5 (1gb because ram is expensive). It has an UPS-hat and a PCIE hat. The pice firewire card is connected by a riser cable to the m.2 M-Key slot of the raspberry pci hat. The pci card needs 12V which is provided by the boost converter module which is connected to the UPS-Hat. The Display is a Raspberry compatible MIPI DSI Touch Display. Which worked out of the Box with the current raspbian image - Nice. It all runs on Battery - don't know how long.

You need to recompile the kernel with FireWire module enabled. I did it on device, took ages.

you can record with a single command, no desktop environment needed:
dvgrab is for recording the minidv input.
ffmpeg is for encoding to file. I experimented with different compression settings (-crf 24), it's interesting to see how the CPU-usage is affected by different settings. (higher compression => higher CPU-usage)

ffplay is for showing the current camera feed.

export DISPLAY=:0
dvgrab -format raw - \
| tee >(\
ffmpeg -i - -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -vf "bwdif=mode=1" -crf 25 -tune zerolatency -pix_fmt yuv420p "recording_$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S).mp4") 
\| ffplay -fflags nobuffer -flags low_delay -vf "drawtext=fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf:text='%{pts\:hms}':fontsize=24:fontcolor=white:box=1:boxcolor=black@0.5:x=(w-text_w)/2:y=h-50" -i -

The whole thing is not really reliable now. I thing I have contact issues with the FireWire cable. When I move the Camera around it shakes the connector and i get weird artifacts and then it stops working.
Also an UI would be nice.
I have also the Problem that the camera goes into demo mode and cylcles through its effects.
I heard you can put a Tape into it and leave it at the end? Need to try that.
The Viewfinder is using a grayscale CRT, that's making an high pitched noise, like CRTs do. That's why i prefer to use the LCD of my SONY-TRV110E. The sound is otherwise still noisy.