It would help to know if you are saving camcorder video or backing up a personal collection of shows- you might want to organize things differently.

I went through this recently, and found that my time was more than doubled using a computer as compared with a stand-alone DVD recorder.

A couple observations:

A number of people have reported that homebrew DVDs have failed in as little as 6 months, not from scratches or poor storage; perhaps from defective media? Don't toss your tapes prematurely.

If you are transferring one-of-a-kind vids, keep in mind that DVD is in a major transition and will be for some time- will dual layer take over or blu-ray or something else? Will you be doing the job all over again in a year or so?

If you will be editing, you want to save as DV. (A cheap kludge option for that - an 'obsolete' Sony Digital8 camera with passthru.) You may want to check out data DVD procedures if ultimate quality is an issue...

Good luck!