A few years ago, I purchased a Hauppauge PVR-150 card.  This card enabled me to copy home video from tape to digital files and DVD (and the card does work, it's just that the process is not so simple).  The PVR-150 has a hardware assisted video compressor for converting analog video to MPEG-2 formatted digital video, which on paper should make the conversion process faster and allow higher quality video capture.

This appeared to be a simple project:  hook up the camera to the card inputs, load the video tape and press the play button.

Ah, the naïveté of of it all.  It turns out capturing video is a grinding process.  I found that for every piece of home video, I spent about twice the number of hours than the play time on the tape.

If I had two hours of video on tape, I spent a minimum of four hours capturing.

Why?

1. My cameras are old and cannot be repaired.  They have to be treated gently.
2. The PVR-150 tends to lose it's mind after an hour or so of video capture.

After capturing hours of snow, I figured out I had to sit at the computer for the entire period of capture, watching for the first signs of video deterioration and stopping the capture to let the card "rest" (what ever an IC chips does when it "rests".)

What have I discovered from this multi-year odyssey?

1. Use a video service to convert your old tapes to DVD.  The $250 I have spent with video conversion saved me approximately 120 hours of nursing my video capture card and ancient cameras.  Instead of sitting at home, bored out of my mind capturing home video, editing video captures and burning DVDs, I can enjoy the old videos of my kids on my DVD player.
2. Spend $90 and buy Cyblerlink's PowerDirector 9 to edit the DVD files and produce really nice home movies in whatever file format you desire.
3. Buy a digital video camera for $200+ and quit messing around with tape.  I unplug my 16 GB SDHC memory card from my camera and plug it into my computer to transfer MP4 video files.  Takes minutes, not hours.

I used to use Microsoft Movie Maker, but the number of improved features in PowerDirector make this product worth the purchase price.