We could probably derail the entire thread talking about video archival, it is a huge topic. I would recommend checking out
VideoHelp,
DigitalFAQ, and
Doom9 forums for detailed guides and help, although I will caution that the amount of information is overwhelming and there are some highly opinionated people over there (as you might find in any niche forum)
Don't stress too much about it and find a workflow that works for you and your needs. What works best for me may not work best for you.
I would very much not recommend Legacybox;
here is an entire video from channel VWestlife on the terrible quality of their work. There are probably other services out there that
will do a good job, I just don't know of one.
I embarked on a project to archive all of our home videos during 2019-2020; for analog tapes (VHS, Hi8) I purchased some expensive and high-end equipment to do the playback and capture, and the post-processing and encoding was a lengthy and compute-intensive pipeline using Avisynth and a half dozen other tools. The stuff we had on MiniDV was actually by far the easiest, since it's already in a digital format. All you need is a computer with a FireWire port, a cable, and something like
WinDV. That will give you raw AVI capture, and then you can encode as you wish from that, assuming you want to dramatically reduce the file size and make the content more usable/sharable. The encoding from AVI can even be done years later if you want; the important bit is really getting the bits off of the tape (which will deteriorate over time) onto something generally more long-lasting, like archival drives and/or a backup service.
