For audio, I prefer the Creative line of products, SoundBlaster Audigy Live is a good line and most software mfgrs write to them as a standard. Video is another story, as each mfgr has their own software along with a capture device. Your choice would be an internal or external device. Internal would be either a PCI or the newer PCI-E, depending on what machine you have and it's internal interface bus. External would usually be USB.

I'm having the same problem. I've been trying to figure out what to buy to transfer my VHS home movies to DVD. I have several 1 hour VHSC tapes that I want to put on DVDs with no change of quality. I know that's not possible since it is going from analog to digital but I want to keep as much of the quality as I can. Some of them already look a bit fuzzy and the audio isn't always easy to understand due to the camcorder mic. I don't want skipped frames and I don't want delayed audio. Its ok if 1 hour of video uses an entire DVD disc. The DVDs need to be playable on a regular home DVD player. Each VHSC tape has multiple events recorded on it. It would be nice if I could assign each event to a track. Stereo would be good too but not necessary. The camcorder didn't record in stereo but if I'm going to use the hardware to watch television it would sound better with stereo. Should I use an S-Video cable instead of composite between the VCR and capture hardware? Should I avoid a USB capture device and choose one that uses Firewire or an internal PCI card slot? I've read that capture devices using USB need to compress the data more in order for all of it to get to the hard drive through the USB cable and that may affect quality. I've looked at a variety of video capture hardware but not sure about what to check for in the hardware specs and software, what product is well made, and what to stay away from. Suggestions?

WIndows XP SP2
Albatron PX915 motherboard
noisy Realtek built in audio (may have to upgrade sound for this)
1 GB DDR 3200 RAM
Pentium 4 3GHz CPU
Western Digital 120GB PATA100 hard drive
Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT 128MB video card
plus some less important stuff
havn't bought a DVD burner but plan to