I have a Compaq Presario 2.8 GHz, with 120 GB HDD, 1 Gb RAM, DVD ROM, DVD/CD Writer and internal Firewire.

I want to back up a library of VHS tapes to DVD.

I have just purchased a DAC100 A-D convertor (yet to be delivered)

I believe that the DAC100 is better (less danger of dropped frames) than a video capture card. Is this correct? Am I doing the right thing?

Any advice appreciated.

Certainly along the right lines. Do you know what format the A2D box will save the files on the HDD in? i.e. does it capture to DV-AVI (like mine) or will it encode to MPEG2 before writign to the HDD?

This might well make a difference as to what software you will need.

To produce your DVDs you will need some sort of DVD authoring program. These typically 'prefer' MPEG2 files as their source but I suspect some programs will work with other formats too. Check into this because you might need another program (TMPGenc?) to convert your avi files (if that is what you get from your capture) to MPEG2 so you can build your DVDs with menus etc.

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

just curious but what's ur cpu?

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Pentium 4 2.4C
1GB Kingston HyperX PC4000 Dual-Channel
Abit IS7-G
2x80GB Western Digital 7200RPM 8MB Cache RAID 0
ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro
Sony DVD-ROM
NEC CD-RW
NEC 19\" CRT

I understand that it capture to DigitalVideo (DV).

I will look into TPMGenc - thank you.

A Pentium 4 2.8GHz with Hyperthreading

This is the spec dor the DAC100 A-D convertor:

Selectable video standard:

NTSC (525 lines / 60Hz), PAL (625 lines / 50Hz).

Inputs: DV, Y/C, Composite.
Outputs: DV, Y/C, Composite.

Two 6-pin FireWire (iLink) I / O ports, Available in
NTSC 4:1:1 or PAL 4:2:0 DV25 format (25Mbps data transfer rate).

Selectable Video level, at 0 IRE or 7.5 IRE.
Video Comb Filter for High Quality Video.
Video input source auto-detection.

Audio Sampling Rate:

Selectable 32KHz (12-bit) or 48 KHz (16-bit) for unbalanced audio.

Audio Decoding Rate:

Selectable 32KHz, 44.1KHz or 48KHz DV audio decoding.

Formats:

DV (iLink), Digital 8, Video 8, Hi8, VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C and S-VHS-C, U-Matic, etc.

Computers:

PowerMac, iMac, Windows 98 / ME / 2000 and XP.