I don't want to be Fellini. I just want to transfer aging VHS tapes of classic horse races to a more stable medium. Creative Labs seems to have read my thoughts in designing its USB-based Video Blaster MovieMaker video converter. The converter box has S-Video and microphone ports, too. I liked the control software enough to bypass the included Ulead VideoStudio 4 software and use that disk space for MPEG files.
Digital video requires lots of memory and processing power.
Creative Labs recommends a system with a Pentium II-300 or better CPU, 64MB of RAM, and 2GB of free hard disk space. A PC equipped with a PIII processor, 128MB of RAM, and a graphics board made since 1999 would probably work better. But if you have the horsepower and the megabytes, the Video Blaster MovieMaker could help you smoothly convert from yesterday's medium to today's. Stringent hardware and memory requirements, limited ability to change settings. Worthwhile for amateur videophiles with the processing power and memory to spare.