DVD making PC

[formentz]

Hi guys,
I have a friend who owns many documentaries in VHS, and he's scared that he could get them lost because the VHS cassettes aren't so safe...

So he would like to encode them to DVD-R disks.
What hardware should he buy for his PC?
And what software too?

I had some time ago an ATI All in Wonder video card and successfully encoded a VHS tape to DivX, with the ATI recorder I made the vobs in MPEG2 and then encoded to DivX.
Is there a better (at a reasonable cost) solution?
He doesn't need to encode in DivX, only vob because he will burn DVDs to make 'em play in his home DVD player.

TIA
Ciao
Formentz

[snw]

I would suggest that you buy an analogue videocapture card (a friend has a pinnacle dc10+ and it works well) or if you have a dv camcorder with analogue input (most of them can be patched for that...) you can hook it up with the vhs and use your camcorder as analogue to dv converter and record directly to harddrive through a firewire card. Then I'd use TMPEG to encode to mpeg2. I haven't done any DVD authoring so I can't help you on that part...
Hope it works out!

[Dentista]

Using card with analogue input and hardware MPEG2 encoder is a smart choice, I'm using Hauppauge PVR for that purpose, but keep in mind that (e.g. PVR can only make MPEG2 704x576) can cause some problems when you try to load output mpeg file into DVD authoring software. Ulead DVD workshop have option to define exact specifications of input stream, including resolution, and works fine for me, but Sonic products (MyDVD for instance) can't recognize PVR mpeg as valid mpeg stream.