Digitizing old VHS tapes to DVD format

This is sweet, got the VHS to DVD setup rollin' now on my home computer.

I bought a Hauppauge Windows Media Center TV Tuner card with S-Video and Stereo Audio input (plus Cable Input). It has an on-board MPEG2 hardware compressor, so it's pretty straightforward to record stuff. There are almost no options, just .TS or .MPG format, so that's pretty simple.

I did a test record from the VHS player to my tuner card's S-Video input, and I am running the audio through my Behringer sound board that I bought for guitar recording. This is pretty solid cause I can get an extra audio volume control and could potentially do some mixing of the audio (boost lows or highs, as needed). Seems like I'll probably just run the audio feed straight to the capture card, though. From here I record the S-Video input inside Win-TV7, and that saves out both a .TS and a .MPG file. It looks like .TS is actually Mpeg2, but Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker (which I JUST learned about) don't know how to open the .TS format. So I'll store the .TS as backup, and I'll keep the .MPG as the one I will burn to DVD.

Finally, I will edit the video if necessary in Windows Movie Maker (though I am a bit concerned about adding extra video artifacts if it compresses it again...), and then export out to Windows DVD Maker. This is actually a pretty darn slick interface, and it adds titles and menus etc. to your DVD which is playable on your actual DVD drive. Pretty amazing stuff!