I play the tapes on my stereo SVHS VCR through a video capture card (mine is a USB 2.0 portable one) and I am using VirtualDub which is a video capturing/editing programme where you can enhance the video and audio of a grainy VHS tape to make into high quality AVI files and put onto DVD. If you only play the tape on a basic VCR and record it with your generic DVD recorder you now use instead of a VCR for tv recording, then your new DVD will have the same grainy quality that your current VHS tapes have. If you use this programme and its various filters, you can get rid of all of the graininess and bring life into the DVD copy which can be as much as 5x better picture quality than the original tape. It has many filters to achieve this. They are not simply 'blurring' as you are probably thinking. :P Much more complex and technical than simply blurring, I do not blur mine, I de-interlace, add black hue and add a few more filters and the picture quality looks
almost as good as a real DVD. Bonus thing is this, my originals I recorded on a Stereo VCR, so the audio will be Dolby 2.0 which is what basic DVD audio is.
You need a HUGE HDD to do this, each episode takes up between 11gb and 50gb when encoded...