First I bought one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Video-C...rds=elgato+vhs
And it is
very easy to use, but the output looks like crap. Looks great while you're capturing, because you're seeing what the VCR is playing. But then it overly compresses the files and there is a huge difference in quality between the original vhs and the mp4 file it creates. And there is no control of bitrate output or quality of any kind.
Then, after much research, I almost bought this:
http://www.amazon.com/Canopus-770101...s=canopus+advc
I found many positive comments on forums talking about the Canopus. Seems it's a very highly regarded unit for analog-to-digital conversion.
But what I finally ended up using is my friend's DV video camera as a passthrough. It performs the same task as the canopus 110, but saved me from spending the $175. I just had to get a firewire card, as that is the only way DV video can be sent into a computer. Any USB device will not give good results from what I understand (like the Elgato above). Plug the VCR cables into the camera, and then the camera firewire cable into the computer, and capture away! I capture straight into Adobe Premiere. The raw AVI files from capturing are HUGE, but once the video is edited/trimmed, I re-encode to MPEG-2 files. This looks identical to the original VHS. I messed with the newer H.264 compression, but nothing kept the original look better than MPEG-2.
Hopefully that all makes sense. Let me know if I can clarify anything.