Question Family treasures stuck on Sony Handycam--any suggestions?

[FlorenceGray]

Hi,
My dad kindly recorded our wedding on his Sony Handycam DCR SR30 but since then we've been unable to download the material because he's lost the docking station. It has an internal hard drive which means there's no way of getting the material off of it without the docking station to connect it to a computer. I've searched online (ebay, all the usual places) but can't find anywhere that I can buy this as a single part without having to buy the whole camera.
Any ideas much appreciated--as our wedding and various other family occasions are still stuck on this!
Flo

 

[helpstar]

Buy the whole camera with the docking station, backup/copy your data safely to at least two separate HDDs , sell all and get a better camera with direct PC connection or sell the one camera without the docking station.

 

[FlorenceGray]

Thank you for your advice--much appreciated!
Buying another camera is expensive so thought I'd ask one more question--the camera has an AV port on it, does anyone know if it's possible to buy a cable that would link the AV port to a USB port on a laptop to transfer the data?
Thank you again,
Flo

 

[helpstar]

That´s called a video grabber device. The problem with these devices is often, that the quality is not as good as the original one and that the audio could be out of sync.

Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/TOTMC-Captur...keywords=video+grabber&qid=1578418783&sr=8-17

The camera will playback the video and audio in real time via the cable and the grabber will encode it to a video file and transfer it to the laptop.

 

[MDTOP]

Just a comment,
After a trip to Bourbon street I was handed a camcorder with small tapes, all Im owned was a vhs system.
Using sound software I was able to play tape into computer via capture card and then burn it to several DVD's for all to enjoy.
It's your wedding! find a professional to transfer your memories asap.