Haha, same here! I digitised a few tapes some years ago and the ads were somehow part of the fun. Similarly though I have network-level and blocking these days in addition to device-based blockers.

I was rather interested to see that people have been hacking VCRs to get better signals out of them for digitising old tapes. Looked a bit more complicated than I want to get into, admittedly, but the results were great.

Ugh, this thread just reminded me of the pile of miniDV tapes a friend gave me to rip!