MiniDV to USB/1394?

[SXRguyinMA]

Alright my old camcorder is the MiniDV style. I've got hours upon hours of video I'd like to rip to my computer. On the down side, the heads are dirty from not being used in a couple years and wont read a lcear image. I've tried cleaning the heads, but to no avail.

I've looked into Canon's repair facilities to send it out and have it cleaned, but I've heard horror stories of people waiting months without any word on their unit. I dont want to wait that long and honestly dont want to spend the cash to clean it when I'm going to be buying a new one soon with an internal HDD.

So what I'm looking for is basically a MiniDV player that hooks up via USB or 1394 to transfer my tapes to my HDD. Anyone seen anything like this? A quick Google search got me nothing but "how to hook your camcorder to your PC" and so on.

Thanks!
Will

[mtekk]

Probably the best thing to do is find a friend that has a MiniDV camcorder that can hook up to a PC (99% of them will be FireWire 400 devices (IEEE1394)) and borrow it. The only things that I know read MiniDV are those camcorders and anything else would be a specialty product that probably is expensive.

[Bopher]

I'm with mtekk on this one. Find someone who has a camcorder and borrow it. If I still lived in MA I'd let you use mine but here I am in the middle of nowhere. Out of curiosity I did a search in google for MiniDV tape players to see if there was just a player that could get you at least downloading but everything I saw cost either the same as a whole new recorder or had only outputs to RCA, orr S-Video. I suppose you could do a capture from S-Video if you have a tv card.