I have shoot and produce video professionally so the following may be useful.
A quick look at the thread mentioned above does not really seem to answer the main problem - which is getting the VHS video into the computer.
As it's an analogue format the only way is to get a capture card which can be USB (ideal for laptop) or PCI (for tower). For limited use I would suggest a ADS Video Express USB "dongle". This has standard a/v inputs that you can connect to your video player and connects to the laptop usb port. It also comes with the relevent capture software. If you are ever likely to want to copy ONTO VHS tape the cheap devices won't wotk as they are only one way, i.e. no analogue out option.
Once you have the dongle up and running the first stage is just a case of run the software and copy the tapes onto the computer.
The copied tapes will not however be in a format suitable for DVD. Maybe you have some software installed to make DVDs but if not there is plenty around ranging from cheap and cheerful (Ulead, Pinnacle) to bloody expensive (Adobe Encore). Although Encore does a great job and has lots of bells and whistles, they will all do simple DVDs OK.
The copied video can take up a lot of room in standard Mcirosoft AVI and it's tempting to copy as MPG which takes up about 10th of the space. There are a couple of problems with using MPG though, there is a lot more processing needed while capturing and its possible the computer won't keep up and, if you want to do any edits to the file before making a DVD, MPG is harder to edit properly.
Regarding capacity, while it's true that 2 hours is the most you will get at anything approaching DVD quality remember that VHS is FAR short of DVD quality and the analogue capture system is likely to reduce the quality a little more and there is no way to make poor quality better so it's no problem cramming a lot more than two hours on a disc. Two other answers are use two layer discs or split the recordings. Two layer discs will not work on all DVD players so its worth checking one before doing a lot of work. Sometimes a DVD player will not find the second layer at all or may hang at the changeover point. Splitting the VHS tapes is the easier answer. Just capture as two separate files and make seperate DVDs.
I note comments on copy protection on the other thread but forget it. Both digital and analogue protection is easy to break and adding it is not an option when making discs on a PC.
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