i have recently been trying to copy some old vhs tapes onto cds and was wondering if there was any way to "burn" them onto my computer .. if so would i require extra hardware such as cables etc .. plz respond thnx:)
Molemanex

Yes, you can. You will need an "input" into your PC however. You can I think, get specialist cards specifically to capture video input, but I think the cheaper option is to get a TV card. Pretty much all of these have a standard aerial input, along with the "yellow" video input. Most of these TV cards also come with recording software, so you should just be able to connect your video to the card, press play and then record with the software provided. Then you can just burn to CD/DVD. You then have the added bonus of being able to watch/record TV on your PC :-) If you need any more help/advice, just let me know.

Just a few thing to be aware of:

There are 2 type of capture cards - software capture and hardware capture, software is more intesive on your pc processes so you may not be able to much else though the cards are cheeper. Hardware capture is obviously 'faster' depending on how good you cards is.

Disk size ! - any type of capture will use a lot of disk space, for example if you captured a full screen (640x480) video without compression you would end up with approx 17.5 megs per minuite of video !! (that's 64 gig for 1 hour) but you can compress in real-time the capture.

Here a few guides you might find usefull:

clicky 1 (http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/vidcap.ars)
clicky 2 (http://www.videohelp.com/capture)
clicky 3 (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/start.html)

Since you are transferring vhs tapes, it wouldn't really benefit you to use a hardware encoding capture card as you won't need to do heavey encoding. Just use a cheapo software encoding capture card if that's the path you choose.

There are also devices that connect via usb that you can use to transfer tapes to your computer and burn them to cd/dvd. I have used the dazzle devices in the past and they work pretty nicely for transferring vhs, but can't handle high resolution so I wouldn't use them for any other purpose. Also, the software provided with them is horrible, so I'd recommend using something else.

thanks everyone

after taking your advice i had a look on the novatech website for the "capture cards " and found 50 or so results ... would anyone be able to recommend a card for recording videos through a vhs player onto my pc from novatech as this would allow me to purchase the product from a warehouse store rather than purchasing over the internet.. any comments would greatly be appreciated .. thnx again

after looking through the capture cards would it not be easier to buy a dvd recorder and connect this to the vhs player .. then simply record onto dvd from the vhs ... if anyone knows if this works then please reply .. greatly appreciated thnkyou

Don't have a DVD recorder, so I couldn't tell you. If this is more useful as a device to you than the TV Tuner/Capture card, then I guess it would be a better solution for you. Is this Novatech US or UK? The card here would do what you wanted;

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?PIN-26866

thankyou :)