Several times I came close to getting the equipment and making the effort of transferring all my old VHS tapes to DVD-R. But slowly but surely, so much of my material (like some of the vintage-tv material I had recorded on VHS) kept getting released commercially on DVD.
However, it does look like my remaining fare has rather little chance of becoming available. Old films that haven’t been syndicated to television since the days of 16mm, and likely haven’t even yet had copies digitally re-mastered by the studio owners themselves.
I had put it off for at least 10 years since I knew I wanted to do it. Now with this Elgato thing, I plug it into USB, connect via RCA cables to the VCR/Camera. Hit play, walk away and it's done. It used to be much more difficult. The software lets you trim out the blank space at the end and it saves it in a decently compressed format.
I had borrowed one of those VCR-->DVD recorders and that put me off for a few years since it didn't work worth a crap. It sorta worked, but the resolution was garbage.