I decided to update this, since these dongles are still selling and I bought one recently. These are the fruits of trial and error. Unlike some people on various forums, i have had no trouble with the dongle itself: it works fine once you have the correct settings. First of all, most of those dongles apparently are model no.
DC60. If you have model
DC60+ you are in luck, because the above-mentioned commercial mac option from EchoFX will work for you. For the rest of us, who picked up the DC60 on ebay, the only option is still [in May 08] to run under Windows. Warning: this is time-intensive and will tie up your computer for some time, so make sure you really want that video footage!
I don't recommend using either Parallels or VMWare for this, since they crawl along when asked to do this task. I assume you have a Windows [XP] partition with at least 5-6Gb of free space. Do a restart and option-boot into your Windows partition. Install the programs on the CD that came with your dongle: Ulead VideoStudio SE and the drivers. If you have enough hard-drive space, you may be able to do everything including making your DVD in Windows, but I would estimate you will need a minimum of at least 40-50 GB to achieve that. If, like me, you allocated only 20GB to your windows partition, you will need to break the task into bits. The first time you do this, you will need to input your settings [see below], after that you may be able to use the wizard.
First, import your VHS offering via the dongle and save as MPEG/DVD. You really need to end up with DV footage, but the amount of spare disk space required for DV is again of the order of 20-30 GB - and if you have that, why not do it all in Windows?
1.Connect your red, yellow and white [composite] cables to the VHS. [If you are lucky, you will have an S-Video socket on your VHS machine, but most will not].
Set VHS tape going when ready.
2.Start
Ulead Video Studio
3.Select
Video Studio Editor
4.
Tools > select
Capture Plug-in >
Ulead DSW MPEG Capture Plug-in
5.Select
Capture tab >
Capture Video
6.
Options icon
>
Video & Audio Capture Property Settings >
Source tab
Input Source = Video Composite
TV System = PAL
Audio Device = USB Audio Interface
tick
USB Audio Device Monitor
8.Click
Capture Video
9.
Stop Video to stop and save.
Once you've got your MPEG footage, reboot into OS X. Double click on your Windows hard-drive icon. You should find, if you accepted the default settings in installing Ulead VideoStudio SE, that your footage is found in this path: Documents and Settings > (Your User Name) > My Documents > Ulead VideoStudio SE > 10.0 > [mpeg file/s with names like uvs080511-002.MPG]. Drag it to somewhere on your hard drive/s where you have plenty of free space to work with.
You can use the free program MPEG Streamclip [or possibly ffmpeg, although I haven't tried] to load your footage and then save as DV* format. This DV file is easy to import into iMovie - and you're away from there.
* I suggest you stick with DV - I tried .mov and MPEG-4 but they were sometimes imported and sometimes not.
If anybody has an easier way, please let us all know
Peter
