A couple years ago I bought a Vaio Media Center PC, in large part to have a simple way of transforming those boxes of VHS bricks into nice small DVDs or (even smaller) video files. Whoa, major error!
For two years I had hassled around with Sony's impossible and irretrievably-buggy video capture software to no avail ("DVD Gate" and "Click to DVD" now play starring roles in my nightmares, right alongside Sheryl Crow and Albert Gore staring menacingly at my toilet paper...) So I'm scouring the "Multimedia" section of Forums dot Techguy dot Org and one of the senior members is recommending an external USB video capture box by ADS. After learning that most, if not all, of the competition have major problems syncing audio and video - Dazzle and Pinnacle spring immediately to mind on that issue - compared with generally rave reviews of ADS's product, I sprung for the DVD Xpress.
Bottom line: I had the thing plugged in, the software installed and my crusty old video footage happily - finally - making the journey to digital immortality, within the space of fifteen minutes flat. It was one of those "Pinch yourself, could it really be this easy?" moments, and the answer is "Yes."
No audio-video sync problems so far, the image quality is lossless, and the CapWiz capture software has impressive configuration flexibility for output formats, bit rates, audio and video resolution, as well as all the usual brightness/contrast/color adjustment controls.
The bundled Ulead Video Studio 9 SE was significantly less impressive. I haven't messed with it in depth, but my attempt to add a simple text title to the beginning of a digitized video of a jam session with the boys was frustrating as hell so I just blew it off. What I've read in other reviews leads me to believe that getting some other second-party editing software is a wiser option - I hear lots of recommendations for Nero but...that name is just a tad creepy, ain't it? (I can just picture the marketing brainstorm session: "'Hitler?' Nahh. How about 'Stalin... 'Che?' Errmm...'Nero' Yeah! Highfive!") But I digress... PC Mag says Roxio VideoWave 8 is a good bet for secondary processing and editing, also top reviews have been nabbed by Cyberlink's PowerDirector 6, ArcSoft's ShowBiz DVD 2.1, and Corel's Video Studio 11.
If you're someone who's long dreamed of burning all of those Cro-Magnon VHS tapes onto your PC's hard drive or DVDs but have struggled with the needlessly incomprehensible mechanisms that came with your computer, trust me: The 80 or so clams you'll spend on the ADS DVD Xpress would be a bargain at twice the price. Why computer manufacturers are apparently incapable of integrating something this simple and user-friendly into the actual PC (! - duh,) will likely remain one of those Great Mysteries to keep techies and future archaeologists scratching their heads for centuries, but no matter. Just get this thing, you'll be glad you did.