How best to save VHS tapes to DVDs using a Mac ?

I have over 30 VHS tapes, eight Hi-8 tapes, and a player for both formats. Would like to make DVDs of these movies. There are a few USB adapters (Elgato Video Capture for $100, KWorld DVD Maker 2x for $28) and Roxio makes Easy VHS to DVD 3 Plus for $60. Have looked through AV forums on other websites and the directions are not concise, and are aimed at the PC platform. Prefer to use a Mac.
What is the fastest, easiest, and best way to save these VHS tapes to DVDs using a Mac ?

Frank Caggiano wrote:
Are you sure neither player has a digital output? FireWire would be the most likely connector on that type of equipment.
Both VHS & Hi-8 are analog tape formats so it is extremely unlikely that VHS players or Hi-8 camcorders would have built-in analog to digital converters. That's why you need a product that includes a hardware A-D converter like the three mentioned by the OP.
Roxio's Easy VHS to DVD 3 product is for Windows -- there is no software compatible with OS X included. The Easy VHS to DVD for Mac product does include OS X compatible software but it gets poor reviews at Amazon, has apparently not been updated in some time, & the support page for the product has some "page not found" links suggesting Roxio isn't currently supporting the product very well.
The KWorld DVD Maker comes with a software driver for its A-D converter, which apparently uses a Empia 28xx family chipset. According to this that driver will not work with recent OS X versions, but for $30 one can purchase the VideoGlide driver to solve that problem. The KWorld product does not include OS X compatible editing software; for that you use iMovie (& presumably Toast or iDVD or something else) to burn the movies to DVDs. That makes the price about the same as the Roxio solution but complicates support because hardware & software are coming from different companies.
The Elgato Video Capture product should be compatible with most OS X versions (but I could not find anything specifically about at beyond the typical "10.5 & above" kind of comment which may or may not mean it supports 10.8 or 10.9) but it captures to H.264/MPEG formats only, so like the KWorld you still need something to convert that to MPEG 2 to burn the captures to a standard DVD.
So basically, there is no easy "one step" method to transfer VHS (or any of the other analog video formats) to DVD's. Depending on the version of OS X in use, it should be fairly easy to convert the analog source material to a digital format that can be used with iTunes, iMovie, etc., but editing it & particularly burning that to a DVD that will play in a regular DVD player will take more work.

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+We want to put them in a digital format that will be easier to store and play and safer from eroding over time, so I guess the end format I'm looking for is DVDs.+
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How best to save VHS tapes to DVDs using a Mac ?

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