So how's your music closet looking? If you're like most of us, you've probably got three-dozen DVDs, remote controls for all your hi-fi components and... let's not even talk about all those old videotapes. All over the country, stacks and stacks of tapes are gathering dust in people's living rooms. Whether home videos or cinematic classics; who wouldn't rather have all those old films on a few sleek DVDs?

Image deterioration due to dwindling magnetization isn't the only problem with VHS tapes. Over the years, the ravages of time take their toll on the tape material itself, meaning that sticks and tears unfortunately happen all the time.

But how can you burn a passel of videos onto DVD quickly and easily? By far the simplest option remains the purchase of a hi-fi DVD recorder, but a proper device can easily run to a few hundred dollars or euros. That's clearly too much money for mere occasional use.

We took a look at an interesting alternative from ADS Tech here in the THG lab: DVD XPress. The unit is a USB 2.0 device with an integrated MPEG encoder. It features composite and S-Video inputs to send the compressed data to the PC via USB.