most video capture cards and dongles (search for video capture, ebay has lots- other places too, but you said cheap) have at least a basic capture program with them.

unless you want spendy (for conversion off dvr's- vhs is 200-250 lines horizontal at best) or inexpensive but biased toward video surveillance recording, mpeg-4 is going to be in software. the actual capture will be in mpeg-2 and compressed on the fly- allocate more hdd space and record the mpeg-2. compress later. you have to have a card or usb device to digitize video from an outside source on nearly all computers. some video cards have video in as well as out, but you'll have to do the research.

WinAVI Video Capture 2.0 is a freebie, works with many video capture sources on windows, including cheap web cams, long as the driver's installed. Plain vanilla cards/dongle systems should work well with it.

Not so hot on things like my DVD Xpress DX2, a GO7007 based external capture box with hardware DivX/Mpeg-4 encoding without involving the computer's cpu, but it's an imperfect world.

I'm assuming when you say "video" you're referring to VHS. If that's the case here are links to articles that I think address your question. I hope you find them helpful.

"How to Convert VHS to DVD"
http://www.signvideo.com/conv-v-to-d.htm

"Digital Focus: Convert VHS Tapes to DVDs"
http://www.pcworld.com/article/97624/digital_focus_convert_vhs_tapes_to_dvds.html

"Beginners Guides: Converting Videotape Into Video Files"
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=813

- Renegade -

I am going to say no on DV. I mean like the vhs videos that go in the vcr (not scaled down camcorder ones). The format of mov, wmv, would be fine

Do you mean DV or other camcorder video to a digital format (like MOV, WMV, etc.)?

I am an instructor and teaching an online class is there a program (preferably free or inexpensive) that will convert a video to digital so I can load onto a course management system for my students to access? thanks in advance for any help!

Todd