> gemini for auto tagging of family members

With all respect, reading this part made me feel uneasy.

I am going to finish such a project soon myself, including some old Video8 tapes! Sounds like you're on macOS, Any reason you didn't use iMovie for the capture itself?

The Video8 tapes have already been digitalized via a Digital8 camcorder, but apparently you can get even better quality out of old analog tapes with the vhsdecode project. Let's see if I ever get around to that, but at least it bypass Firewire entirely: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://www.reddit.com/r/vhsdecode/

Can you expand on the Gemini tagging part? What did you do with the tags, import them into Jellyfin after cutting the videos into parts?

A few years ago I did a bit more of a crude flow.

Play the footage on a tv in a dark room. Place a 4k camera on a tripod and record the tv with audio into the camera audio port.

Worked perfectly.

Went through a very similar journey recently as well. In my case using a Macbook was a non-starter, as certain adapters are prohibitively expensive these days, if you can even get your hands on one. Thankfully my son has a desktop Windows PC and Firewire PCI cards are cheap and plentiful, so getting connected that way worked out. Much better than an earlier attempt via RCA cables (simple but digital -> analog -> digital is not the way to go).

My pipeline was camera -> WinDV -> DVdate (to extract exact datetimes into srt subtitles) -> Handbrake (to convert to mp4).

Is it possible to accomplish tagging with local AI instead of Gemini?

> Digitizing my old tapes was one of the most rewarding side projects

I also wanted to do that, but then I realised I needed to invest more time and may need some hardware, so one day I simply had enough, went to a commercial shop and had them turn all the old stuff into digital. The cost wasn't that huge either, so considering that I could also save time (doing it myself), I am ok with that investment. Hopefully the future has digital everywhere. Storage to be cheaper too, ideally.

If you are capturing I find dvgrab is pretty good. It's what I've been using for about 25 years now!

In the olden days when I got paid to shoot real video on a VX2000 and edit it for people, captured using a PCI Firewire card and dvgrab in Slackware, rewrapped with probably mencoder shading towards ffmpeg when it became more popular (and developed!), dual-boot into Windows 2000 and cut in Premiere 5.0, then back into Linux to transcode back to DV if I wanted to write it out to DV tape.

These days I shoot on a PD150 or DSR500 (and quite often some HDV cameras), capture via a PCIe Firewire card and dvgrab in Ubuntu, rewrap with ffmpeg, and edit in Resolve, without the dual-booting step.

If you use dvgrab it will split the capture up into separate clips on shot boundaries based on the pause/unpause markers on the tape. I have not found a way to extract good/no good from the stream, but if you're not shooting on a broadcast camera you don't have this anyway. Timecode is preserved though!

When you load it all up in Resolve, one of the options in the Cut page is "Source Tape View" which runs all your clips together by timecode, and lets you view them as though they were a continuous tape of your rushes, which is how we used to do basic assemble editing in the olden days of clunky tape decks and edit controllers with big rows of red 7-segment displays.

Edit your old home videos. You can do that now, and they'll be far more watchable.