VHS -> DVD, how would you go about doing this?

[ForceCalibur]

Yea, what would I need to buy to be able to do this? Is this gonna cost ALOT?

 

[Jeff7]

Check Newegg for a Hauppauge WinTV-250 or 350 (350 adds TV-out). They run for maybe $100-$150, though I don't remember exactly. That'll let you record from the VCR to the computer. If you don't have a DVD-RW drive, get one of the DVD-+RW drives there, or at the FS/T forum here, and some media for it - that'll probably cost no more than $90 for a brand new drive. And for video editing...there might be some freeware apps out there that can handle MPEG2, though I've not had much luck with them. I've found that Ulead's Videostudio 7 (though version 8 is out now, and it offers some nice features, like, finally, Batch Processing) does the job of editing MPEG2 files, and outputting them to DVD format rather nicely. It is $100 though - but I think it's a pretty capable piece of software.
Just don't expect it to be any better quality than the original recording. The only thing you might be able to improve is the audio - Videostudio lets you strip out the audio and video to separate files. I use Goldwave for all of the sound editing I need to do. It's yet another software package that I actually paid for - I think that their price, about $40, depending on the exchange rate with Canada, is quite fair, considering how much the software can do. It'll let you remove hiss, which my VHS tapes get a lot of, as well as boost the bass and treble, and just generally tweak the sound.
Once you've edited the sound, Videostudio can splice the audio and video back together.

 

[ForceCalibur]

Cool, thanks.

Do you know if there are any free software out there that do what Videostudio 8 does?

 

[Crusty]

You can use VirtualDub for capture into AVI, adn then use TMpegENC to convert to DVD format. Both of those are free, just do a google search for the names and you will find em 🙂