I was hoping for some simple option to put the minidv in a reader that would let me download its content to a mac. I don't a camera anymore and finding an old mac and camera is what I was trying to avoid.

"Digital" has become this weird overloaded term with a second meaning that means "no physical media". You see it mostly in videogames, "bought digitally" means buying it from Steam or another online store as a download, as opposed to a physical disk.

Obviously you're right and and literally every commercial* videogame ever released is digital in the sense that it's binary information, and the movies that person was talking about were already digital on Blu Ray.

You can kind of justify it as literally correct if you infer the context of "digital" referring to the method of transferral, rather than the method of information storage - I.e when I bought a game disk from a shop, the game was transferred to me physically on a disk, but when I bought one from Steam it was transferred digitally. Doesn't really apply as much for this situation tho.

(*I almost said every videogame ever made, but I suppose Tennis For Two and some other experimental games ran on analogue computers)

You’re right. But even better than trying to get a compatible PCI card, find an older MacBook Pro that has built in FireWire ports and use something like iMovie to direct rip the DV content. Unfortunately, it has to be done in real-time even though it’s digital data. I haven’t heard anyone use a high speed tape drive for them but it would be theoretically possible.

Also, that setup is a pretty good way to digitize Hi8 analog tapes. And I think you can use some of the camcorders as analog to digital converters of an analog video stream (eg, an attached vcr).

Not sure you are trolling or not