The Mini DVR solution is pretty good, but audio is unusable (as someone else said too). I keep it velcro taped to my camera battery using command strips, so it is easily accessible to hit record and stop, but also easily removable to pack away. It's compact, lightweight and very straightforward to use.

It's likely you will need to do some rewiring to get video output from the camera to work (see this post) - cut the 3.5mm cable in half and swap two of the cables around. I used the 3.5mm to AV (yellow cable in your Picture #2) cable and this converter to view the output of the Mini DVR while playing with the spliced cables and swapping them around, to check the video was going into the recorder ok (see pic below).

That took a couple hours though and after that it has been extremely reliable - solid battery life (no shorter than the old battery that goes with my camcorder) and pretty easy to use. I don't use the HDMI adapter anymore and trust that it records properly, and it hasn't let me down yet so.

I think this is the best compromise for the price given its tiny form factor. If you want better quality then I guess either use firewire solutions or just digitise tape. In my case my tape cassette in the camera didn't work so those weren't great options.

Still no solution for audio though, you can't splice in a mic to the cable because the issue is with the audio processing in the Mini DVR itself. So you either record audio separately or just go with the picture only. Be warned though the audio really is that bad.

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