I understand that if I want to save my VCR movies that I need a TV card. I play the movies thru the card and it saves to my hard drive, at least that is what the salesman at a local electronics store told me. He had no idea about getting the movie from the hard drive to CD. My question is what is the best TV card and what software do I need to: (a)get tape to hd and (b)hd to cd?
I have SmartRipper installed as well as DVD2AVI and Tmpgen.
Thanks in advance for the help.

first you need a video capture card, not a tv card. if you have a local computer store, they should have several models. i would get a usb version. good price is around $90.00. if you don't have any, get some good composite (rca) video cables. of course you need a cd or dvd burner. get a copy of power producer software. PowerProducer will have all the instructions you need for getting your vcr tapes to cd. happy converting.

As an ATI owner, I'm going to recommend getting an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon card. Use this card along with the newest version of ATI's MultiMediaCenter software and you will be able to get some decent captures from your VHS tapes. You will hook your VCR up to the ATI card most likely with RCA cables.

You can preset the ATI software to capture to VCD or SVCD and then use somting like Nero to burn it to a CD to watch on your stand-alone dvd player.

Here are a couple of great websites for all the resources you need on capture cards, software, how to capture, etc...:
http://www.dvdrhelp.com
http://www.lordsmurf.com

P.S. I just noticed that you didn't specify weather your VCR tapes are homemade or hollywood movies?

If they are hollywood movies then you will run into copyright protection called Macrovision. You've probably seen this before on a copied movie...picture goes light to dark and can sometimes get twisted looking. There are a few ways to overcome this, if thats what you are intending on doing...

gammer

Whatever you do Don"t Go USB, Not unless it is a Hardware Mpeg compression Box..For AVI Capture it seems that the USB even though it has a Lot of Bandwidth they don"t seem to have been able to utilize the full Bandwidth of USB 2.0 yet in Capture Devices..For Mpeg Capture they seem OK because you don"t need as Much Bandwidth to Transfer Mpeg2 Via USB as you do a Raw Video Signal....
I liked My "All In Wonder Cards" especially the AIW 8500DV which was a Great Card but I"m thinking either one of those New new 10 Bit Capture/TV Cards or something Like a Canopus ADVC-100 which I hear are Awesome....Cheers

Spend more money & get standalone Panasonic DVD RAM recorder.

Quality is great, it is easy to use, so why bother with capture cards etc

Seb