I'll mirror what beachycove has said in my own experiences with an 840av -- it never quite seemed like (stock, which mine was) it was going to be doing a lot of long-form capturing.

What would have been an interesting option to try with a computer-controllable deck is using Premiere 3.x to capture in segments, which it supported. Although what you would ultimately end up is the VHS/Hi8/Beta version of tape shoe shining. I don't even know how well Premiere did this, but it was referenced in the manual.