On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:15:44 GMT, PinkFloyd43
wrote:

I can find the hardware but was wondering if this was something that
could be built by a hobbyist? Googled for a schematic with little luck,
if it can't be built any recommendations on the hardware that goes
between VHS player and Computer/DVD burner?

While you can use the PC and a video capture card like ATi TV Wonder
series, setting it up can be a pain in the butt. The cheap internal
hardware tended to rely on PC too much. External USB hardware is
mostly crap because USB is very chatty, if you use other USB devices
like keyboard and mouse, the captured video can stutter and drop
frames. If you get external device, get the firewire version, they
work much better than usb for high bandwidth use.

If you choose cheap internal video card or USB capture device, and if
you have slow or bogged down system, you'll suffer a lot of dropped
frames so a fast PC would be needed. For initial capture you need to
use codec that has minimial CPU load like Mjpeg or Huffyuv to reduce
the chance of dropped frames. Then run the captured video through
MPEG encoder like TMPGEnc to convert to MPG2 (MPG2 is NOT free, you
can use MPEG-1 instead for DVD but the quality suffers)

Finally you need a DVD authoring program to properly format the final
video file, add in menu and such.

In the long run, it may be easier to pick up a decent stand alone DVD
recorder and hook the VCR to it. Let the recorder burn the DVD
automatically off the tape, then you can rip the burned DVD on your PC
to edit out commercial breaks and unwanted scenes and author them for
final DVD.

For more on VHS to DVD capturing, I would suggest an all free web site
www.videohelp.com which offers link to many guides, many downloaded
tools (some free!), and has message forum to help you out. I am not
getting paid for this plug :-) it's done very well for me in the past.