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Not sure if you'll come back here for answers but will try anyway. I'm assuming you are using a stand-alone unit DVD recorder and then playing the VHS tape while the DVD records it. Unless you do it by a timed recording (by setting the start and end record time), you will have to manually stop the DVD recorder when there is no more video to record. Otherwise, yes, it will continue to run and record blank space. I'm not familiar with any DVD recorders that will resume a recording although you can record to the disk again. So, when you want to record the next video, each subsequent recording will appear as a different title on the DVD. You can give both (or all) their own titles or just leave the default titles. Most recorders have editing functions so you'd be able to erase that blank portion if it happens. To take the best advantage of that, you will want to use the rewritable DVD disks in order to gain back the space on the disk. Otherwise, you will be able to erase the blank portions but will still lose that amount of space. We need to know if you are recording by another method than the one I mentioned.

This thread brings up a problem which I have ran into, so please forgive me if it looks like I am hi-jacking this thread, as that is not my intent. I bought a dvd/vhs recorder/player around Thanksgiving and used it to transfer home vhs video tapes to dvd+rw discs. The discs will play on my pc using various video programs. All went well until I tried to transfer the disc contents to my pc hard drive so that I could edit them. My pc has a 2 gig processor, 512 megs of ram, Win xp home with sp2 and a 160 gig HD with plenty of unused space. I downloaded a program called dvd shrink 3.2 hoping it would allow me to transfer the disc to HD. It was a no go as I keep getting various error messages. Does anyone know how to transfer files from a dvd disc to a pc hard drive? I'm baffled. Thanks in sdvance for any help.

First things first. No matter how much you spend, what you record is not going to be any better than the original. Yeah, there might be a little tweaking you can do with contrast and the like, but you will not make a DVD copy of a VHS tape which will look much better than the tape. The keys there then become the quality of the VHS tape player and the tape itself, with the tape itself being the most limiting factor. Tape quality is affected by the original formulation of the tape, how the tapes were used and stored, etc. At this point, there is little you can do about any of that. Let's just assume that the tapes you have are good enough to view and to transfer. If you already have a VHS player which has a picture you like, I would use it. You won't gain much at all by buying a new combo unit. If you have to buy a VHS player, you could consider a combo unit (though I'd check the owner's manual just to make sure you can copy from tape to DVD without problems; I've never done this myself and I'm not sure what the tape copy protection [if any] might do when recorded onto a disk). One thing to consider is the quality of the DVD itself. There is a growing concern about the longevity of DVDs and CDs. "Bargain-basement" or "free-after-rebate" disks often won't hold a valid signal after as short as six months. This is too much work to repeat in a year or two. Make sure you buy high-quality disks from companies like Imation, TDK, Maxell, etc. That will help insure that your disk copies live longer. And get "record-once" DVDs, not rewritable ones. That will help them live longer, too. As for the unit at Target, I'd be leery of why it was returned. A decent name-brand DVD burner goes for about $100; there's little point IMHO to buying a returned one for $50 and spending more on an extended warranty.