Many of us have boxes of tapes that were recorded onto either VHS or 8mm. If stored properly tapes will last a long time. However there are some considerations that make converting your home videos to DVD a worthwhile process.

--It is easier to share a DVD with friends and family. They make a great gift.

--You can create chapters to jump to your favorite scenes.

--You can easily add background music or edit out boring scenes.

--Many times the you can increase the quality from the original source movie

There are many different methods to convert you movies to DVD. One method is to use your PC and the other is to use a stand alone DVD recorder. The PC offers complete control over editing the footage and creating professional looking menus for the DVD. The DVD recorder is the best solution for simplicity, speed and in many cases better quality.

In order to transfer movies with your PC you will need a fairly powerful PC with lots of hard drive space. Raw video footage can chew up to 13 Gigs per hour of video footage. You can transfer the movies to your PC with a dedicated transfer card or an external device to convert the analog signal to DV so it can be transferred through a firewire port onto your PC.

Once the raw video footage is on your PC you can use video editing software to edit the footage and create DVDs. Video editing software can retail from $50-$200 dollars. Some popular companies include Pinnacle, Adobe, Ulead and Sony.

Another method to transfer you home videos to DVD is to use a stand alone DVD recorder. A DVD recorder looks very similar to the DVD player in your home entertainment system. DVD recorders sell for about $200 and up. Some manufacturers offer DVD/VHS combo units which make transferring movies a piece of cake. Look for a DVD recorder with a built in hard drive. These allow you to edit the movies once they are recorded to the hard drives.

Another nice feature of units with a hard drive is that they have similar features to a TIVO device. You can record and store your favorite shows and even allow you to pause live TV like a TIVO. Depending on the size of the hard drive and the quality settings you can easily store 40 hours or more on the hard drive.

By carefully choosing the model you should end up with final product that looks better than the original. That's because certain DVD Recorders by JVC and Toshiba, or any models that have an LSI chipset, have filters to reduce grain and chroma noise.

When recording you will want to record in the highest quality settings possible. This means you will be able to fit about 1 hours worth of video onto a DVD. Since most VHS and 8MM tapes are two hours you will need to split one tape into two DVD's. You can fit more than 1 hours worth of footage on a DVD if the footage is something you don't care too much about. However if you are converting treasured movies go for the best quality you can.