Video capture via USB dongle is definately the way to go - I'm assuming here that these are tapes of TV recordings and camcorder stuff and not copy protected (macrovision).
I did it years ago and struggled because of disc space (had to capture 30 mins at a time!), but now when you can get a 1TB hard drive for £50 you can burn til the cows come home. Also with all the DVD authoring software out there as well as highly capable compression codecs you can't go wrong.
Cheers, Nick