Best quality conversion from VHS to digital domain (USA)
Please tell me you didn't spend thousands of dollars. You can get the hardware you need in under 50.

I rip my VHS tapes with a PVR card as well, the Hauppauge (WinTV) are good ones.

I just use an RCA cable from my VHS player into the TV card, and record the input using V4L tools on Linux.

You'll need to use v4l utils to set the proper input on your card, and then use ffmpeg to copy the stream directly.

Here, I know what the length of the video is, and do a straight codec copy:

ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -t &lt;hours:minutes&gt; vhs.mpg