Hook up your equipment, and organize and collect the VHS tapes you want to capture and burn. Hook up your VCR or camcorder to your computer. If you're going to be using a VCR to play back the VHS tapes, then place your composite or S-VHS cable to the video in on your video card. If you're going to be using a camcorder, hook up the FireWire cable into the FireWire port on your computer or place the video-out cable from your camcorder into the composite video in. With the FireWire connection, audio will be transmitted with the video over the FireWire cable. If you're using the composite cable connection, you'll need to to plug the audio red and white side to the female-composite adapter and plug the adapter into the computer's audio-in jack. Now, put the first tape you want to capture into the VCR or camcorder.
Download and install DVD Video Maker Free from http://protectedsoft.com and install it. Once installed, start the program by clicking on its icon in the Start menu. When you first start the program you'll have to choose from two project types, Video DVD or Web Browser. Pick Video DVD. Now the program will prompt you to choose what you want to do. Pick the first option, which is "Capture and make DVD from Digital Camera." Click Next. Select your video capture device from the video capture options box. If your device is FireWire, the audio option won't matter. If you are hooked up to record audio through your sound card, pick your wave device sound card in this box. Load your VHS tape into your deck and hit Play on the deck. The video should show up on the preview window within the software on screen. Re-cue your tape, and hit the Start button located at the bottom of the screen to start capturing your tape.
Once the tape reaches the end, click the Stop button within the program to save the capture to file. The file name is auto assigned and appears near the Start and Stop buttons. Click Next. You'll see your file in the timeline file box with the duration displayed.Click on the file to select it, and click Next at the bottom. The program will now begin to transcode your file into DVD file structure. This may take a while, depending on how fast your computer is. Once it's done, it will take you to the Burn screen. Browse to the computer's "My Videos" folder for the current user and find the DVD_TS folder. This is your video. In the burn options, pick your DVD burner from the list, pick a burn speed, choose whether or not to do a test-write first and click Burn at the bottom of the screen.