Assuming that you had video editing software and the necessary hardware, is it possible to record an hour long program from videotape onto a blank CD-R? Has anyone tried this? Any help is appreciated. 
All you need is a card / USB capture device and capturing software. Realproducer is very, very easy for this.
If you capture to avi or mpeg format, you can even create a vcd that will play in some dvd players (this will require different software though).
Awldune–thank you for responding. I want to do exactly what you said–transfer my entire videotape collection to DVD’s that I can play on a standard DVD player. Any idea as to what software (other than RealProducer) I’d need to do this?
You need a Burning program that can make Video CD’s.
I know Nero does this, but I’m not sure what else.
You also need to make sure that your DVD player will read CDR’s. I know mine will not, so VCD’s would be useless to me.
Since the video is being placed onto a CD-R that has limited capacity (compared to a DVD), won’t video quality diminish? I’m guessing that the quality of the Video CD would be noticably less than that of the original analog VHS tape. Is this correct?
This site has a number of helpful guides. I would suggest capturing using virtualdub, then converting to vcd format using tmpegenc. Both of these programs are freeware. The vcdhelper site has a listing of dvd players that will play vcds on cdr.
As to the quality, it won’t exactly be dvd quality, but it won’t be bad.
Hope this helps.
Video to cd requires A LOT of processor power.
DVD blanks are very expensive.
If you want to put it in cdrom, you can, or yesvideo.com does it for you ($40 for 2 hours)…
Youll have to capture in mpeg1 & convert to mpg2 & thats where the processor power comes in.
But will there be a noticable degredation of quality compared to the original VHS?
Yes, most likely there will be; VCD compression is very lossy.
If you were willing to make a CD that was only watchable on your computer, you could compress to MPEG4 (check out FlaskMPG).
Actually, you’ll have to capture it ‘raw’ using whatever codecs your capture software supports. You can convert it to whatever the heck you like after that (like Frogstein I’m an advocate of MPEG4).
Only if you’re planning to make a DVD or mini-DVD will you need to convert to MPEG2 (DVD quality) and this is obviously only worthwhile if you’re capturing from DVD or, at worst, SVHS tape, or some digital source (DV, Digital Beta, etc.).
As for VCDs, white book compliant MPEG is pretty much identical to VHS, though the process of digitizing the video can convert the signal to crap as it involves generation loss (playback plus ‘dirty’ cables), and whatever codecs you’re using, some supposedly being better than others.
All this mumbo-jumbo out of the way, no, it’s not all that hard. Seriously.
Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4.0 does VCDs too. I’m not sure if this is the version that ships w/ CD burners these days (it was no-VCDs-for-you version 3.0 for the longest time), but it’s easy enough to find online if you really want to. 