Hi rayneman5,
I have recently just transferred all my old vcr tapes onto my hardrive, before they got completly ruined by their age, and being moved from place to place.
I bought the Happaugue PVR 150, tv card.( Personal Video Recorder)
Its great,, with just a cable from your vcr to the tv card, you can use the pvr to record whatever is on the tapes. Once ripped to your hardrive, you can do as you please with them, copy them to dvd, edit them, or just leave them where they are on your hardrive.
As has already been suggested,, make sure you get a decent sized harddrive just for the storage of the copied tapes. Video media takes up a hige amount of space, even a simple half hour music video could be as large as 3 or 4 GB, so keep an eye on your drives free space, it will fill up very quickly.
As for the legal argument,, i agree with warriorscot,,, its technically illegal, but i for one dont see any harm in reproducing something you have already paid for. Especially if you are transferring it to a more reliable storage medium, which was the reason i copied all of my old tapes.
Once i had copied all my home movies, i started reminiscing, going thru old tapes copied from the tv in the early 80s.
Tapes of concerts etc off the tv, mtv award ceremonys from years gone by, episodes from long ago tv shows,, great stuff. Now its all either on my harddrive, or been transferred to DVD for safe keeping, thrown all the tapes out,, saves loads of space as well.
But the point is,, i paid for my tv liscence,, it has never been illegal to tape stuff off the telly for personal use,, its only when people start mass producing dvds etc that legal issues and criminallity come into play.
With the cost of older films on dvd dropping weekly, i cant honestly see why someone would want to copy from an old poor quality vcr tape for commercial reasons. Most of my older tapes have been replaced with the dvd version anyway, so its only stuff that is no longer out there in the marketplace that you would want to copy.
To those thinking this is all an illegal activity,,, have you NEVER taped something off the telly and kept it on tape ???