I've got a massive collection of home video's, I've made over the span of my kids growing up, including a lot of family, who're sadly no longer with us

We've gone through phases.... we watched them a lot when we first made them, then again a couple of years later and basically since then, they've remained in the cupboard, gradually deteriorating

Now my kids have grown up, I'd really like to share those moments again, together with them

But I've got a small problem, I don't actually own a VCR anymore

So, here's my dilemma's

Do I send them off to get them converted to DVD, at the cost of £10 per hour? (cheapest I've found) God knows how many hours I've got and what crap I'll be converting (my filming and editing skills were almost non existent then )

Or do I "try again" and purchase a machine than does it for you? I bought one of these machines a few years ago, and ended up sending it back, as it went wrong 4 times in the first month!

What I'd ideally, like to do, is get them converted to a format, I could edit on my Mac
But I've read some reviews of gismo's which go from your VCR (which I'd have to purchase) directly to the Mac, whihc sounds great and is apparetnly very easy to do BUT, can take up to 16 hours in all, to get 1hour's worth of conversion. (the max you can convert at one time, is 1 hour, if you want to edit in iMovie before saving to disk... you CAN'T edit once its saved )

So lastly, is there a company that anyone knows of, that can convert the tapes to .Mov or Mpegs etc ready to edit, and put them on DVD or a portable hard drive for me?

Thanks