Step 1. Get Your Home Movies into the PC

This is either going to be incredibly easy or incredibly tedious depending on the type of camcorder you have, or what medium your home movies currently reside. Here's the gist:

Film

If your home movies are on old reel-to-reel film stock, you're probably not going to be able to do this on your own. There are dedicated professional services out there who can get your film into video format and burned to a DVD. Once that's done, hit the DVD section.

8mm / Hi-8 / VHS / VHS-C

Any home movies you have that are currently on an analog tape medium like VHS or 8mm will need to be converted to a digital format before you can convert it with the HP Video Converter. There are many ways to do this. TechLore.com has a series highlighting some different options on how get analog video into a digital format to help get you started.

MiniDV

Even though it's a tape, MiniDV is already in a digital video format that was designed to be captured and imported into PCs sporting FireWire (IEEE-1394) connections. Most MiniDV camcorders should be equipped with a FireWire port. 

There are many programs that can capture video from a DV camcorder, but if you're using Windows XP or Vista, Windows Movie Maker is a good choice.  It's included with all PCs.  To learn how to capture video using Movie Maker, start with this how to from Microsoft.

If using a Mac, iMovie can be used to capture video from MiniDV camcorders over FireWire. Apple has several tutorials here.

DVD

If your home movies are in DVD format, either direct from your DVD-based camcorder or from discs you made yourself, getting them ready for conversion is incredibly simple. All you need to do to get that DVD to your hard drive is copy it to your hard drive over. That's right, pop in the disc, open Explorer, and copy the Audio and Video TS folders right off the disc and onto your hard drive.  In fact, you can even just copy it right to your conversion folder as 

Before you go running to your shelf and grabbing your entire Star Wars collection, keep in mind that the HP Video Converter only handles unencrypted DVD folders. Commercial films are copy-protected. Yes, there are ways to remove copy protection from commercial DVDs, though we're focused just on home movie DVDs for this piece.

Hard Disk and Flash Camcorders

The nice part about hard drive and flash based camcorders is that it's super easy to get video onto your computer. Connect the USB cable from your video camera to the computer, or simply pop the flash card into a card reader, and copy the contents to your computer. 

Depending on the format your camcorder uses to save video, you may not have to do anything to get it into a streaming-friendly format.

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