We had a great collection of VHS tape prerecords and wanted to convert what we could to DVD. We never had a VHS camera so no home movies. I bought a Roxio Easy VHS to DVD 3 converter. It will copy most VHS tapes including copy protected tapes. I found one of the secretes is having a good VHS player and another is a good quality tape. My daughter bought a high end Sony recorder for 7 bucks on line and I found that it reproduces the VHS signal better than anything else I had and therefore my recording is better. The Roxio was about $50.00.
For the copyright police on here. If the Feds or the Movie producers want to hassle me for doing this for my own use, so be it. I feel it is just like music CDs, it is okay to copy those for personal use and a movie like "The Mouse That Roared" is over 20 bucks on DVD on line and most of them available are bootlegged anyway.