How do you playback miniDV's?

they were quite prevalent back in the day and still is to an extent, but how to do you watch the movies on your TV, w/o using the camcorder itself?

stream it down to your PC and burn it on DVD?

what about a tape adapter, do they exist?

there aren't tape adapters for mini-dv that would work on VCR.

I think there used to be miniDV VCR-like devices but they were really expensive.

do i have to stream it real-time onto the computer?

Yes, unless you record it onto the PC into a file and save it for later viewing. It eventually has to stream to the PC in realtime eventually, even if you wanted to just watch it.

thanks for the responses.

lastly,

i have a question re: mini DV vs mini DVD
overall which is better to use re: ease of use, video quality and reliability?

my turnoff with minidvd is that you can only have 30mins of recording time, are there any camcorders that burn directly onto reg DVD's and how long is the duration on those recorders if they do exist? thanks again.

Originally Posted by Sohjonn

thanks for the responses.

lastly,

i have a question re: mini DV vs mini DVD
overall which is better to use re: ease of use, video quality and reliability?

my turnoff with minidvd is that you can only have 30mins of recording time, are there any camcorders that burn directly onto reg DVD's and how long is the duration on those recorders if they do exist? thanks again.

There are many that burn onto regular DVD. I believe it's normally 60min for DVD quality video. You can make it longer but then you decrease quality.

MiniDV is 500 lines of resolution. DVD is normally less than this, depends on the model.

Originally Posted by Sohjonn

what about a tape adapter, do they exist?

Use the firewire port on the camcorder and transfer the video to a DVD recorder.

http://www.supermediastore.com/tape-minidv-to-dvd.html