Thanks for posting this up I've been using AppGeeker Mac DVD Ripper for a while now. it converts DVD to anything (avi, mov, mkv, mpg, mp4, etc.) with the minimize loss of video quality.

If these home movies are important to you then I strongly urge you to have this professionally done. Someone recently emailed me and asked about transferring Hi-8 movies. Here is the response I sent. ---------------------- I have never played around with any Hi-8. What kind of outputs does the player for it have. If you have a 1394 firewire connection then it is easy. Otherwise it is the RCA cables and video capturing. The big problem with video capturing is dropped frames and out of sync audio. This is typically caused by a slow or overworked computer. So you need a fast computer. 2 Ghz+. And it needs to have absolutely no un-needed processes running. No network, no firewall, no antivirus, no popup blockers, no nothing extra. And the hard drive must be defragged before starting. Then there is the problem with the tapes themselves. The video and audio are on different tracks on the tape. Then there is a seperate track (track 21) for keeping everything timed together. Over time the signal on the tapes degrade and so does the timing signal. With a less than perfect timing signal you get dropped frames and out of sync audio. Professionals use a machine called a Time Base Corrector (very expensive machine). A TBC regenerates track 21 and allows better video capture. You can get into the hobby fairly cheap. See how it goes for you and if you like doing it. Most of the video I do is just short videos. Mostly under 5 minutes. Rarely over 15 minutes. Even then I have to be carefull or I get dropped frames and out of sync audio. For long videos I have gotten to where I just record from my DVR to my standalone DVD recorder, then rip the video to my hard drive. No dropped frames or out of sync audio this way. Pooh Bear

Marie reminds me you can do it yourself. You need a capture card in the computer. They're available in all price ranges and come with either analog or DV inputs or both. Most have software with them to do editing. With the software, you can add special effects, transitions between scenes, and ability to manipulate the footage. Even if it doesn't come with software, you do at least have Windows Movie Maker on the computer that will do fine for you. If by chance you're running Windows 98, you cannot do it. 98 can't handle the frame rates or the large files that video creates, and they are EXTREEEEMELY large. 98 also cannot manage more than 512mg of memory, so that makes it more than difficult to render to DVD. If you're running Window XP, you won't have a problem, but you have to make sure you have enough system resources. You need a hard drive with enough storage space and enough free space to accommodate these large files. You need at least 1gig memory and at least P3 (or equivalent) processor if not faster. Rendering takes forever, so try not to do any more than two hours at a time. One hour - 90 minutes might be best. If it doesn't render well or hangs up, you'll know you have to cut it down to less than one hour and just put the rest on a separate DVD. It's really very easy to do, or one of your children might like to get into it since it's hard to trust someone with your memories. Buying a capture card and even if upgrading the computer is necessary, it still won't cost nearly as much as paying a business to do it for you. It's a very time consuming process, so understandably they will charge for that. For example, rendering just one can take 8-12 hours depending on how long it is. I usually just let them render over night. You'd absorb the cost in the first one or two that you do though.

Alisande We had our old 8mm home movies from the 50's & 60's converted to DVD and VHS last year. In total there was about 1000 feet and the cost was about $200 however it was a worthwhile investment that I'm sorry we waited so long for as some of the film had began to deteriorate. If you check in your yellow pages under audio-visual you will probably find a local company who can do this for you saving you the angst of mailing the valuable films. That's how we found the place to do ours. The place we had ours done also had a pricing structure that dropped with the more feet of film you had reprocessed so ask about that.