Many people have movies on VHS tape that they would like to get into a digital format for safekeeping. Well, you can use your PC to do this yourself. You need to get a video capture device for your PC as well as a DVD burner. Video capture devices come in varying formats, from PCI cards to USB or Firewire connected devices. Once set up, plug your VCR output into the video capture input and then play the tape on the VCR. The video capture will capture the movie and save it to your hard drive on the fly. It should be noted here that this is pretty intensive fo the PC, especially the hard drive, so make sure you have a lot of free disk space on a pretty fast hard drive. Once the video is captured to your hard drive, you use some DVD mastering software (many times this comes with the video capture device) to burn the movie to your DVD. A lot of DVD authoring programs will allow you to set up your own menu system on the DVD, too.

This can be an economical way to transfer your movies, however it takes a lot of time. The VCR plays at 1X speed, so it will take as long as your movie is to transfer your movie to the PC. And with this on top of setup and editing, this can be time consuming.