The VR2940 is a versatile machine. In addition to being a DVD player that knows how to skip all of the opening advertising and jump straight to the movie, it's capable of making DVD copies of VHS tapes and also VHS copies of DVDs. (It won't copy anything that uses the Macrovision copy protection, however.) When creating a DVD, you can either transfer a number of short videos to a disc as separate mini-movies, or you can feed a single lengthy movie to disc, allowing the VR1940's built-in YesDVD software to divide it up into chapters and build a menu.

No matter what you choose, the VHS to DVD transfer is a simple process. An on-screen window asks you what video quality you want (HQ allows for an hour of DVD space, SP gives you two hours, and so on, to about four hours at the lowest quality). Quality decided, push a button to start and you can walk away and come back when the tape is finished.

If you're just transferring a single video, you will be asked if you'd like YesDVD to add chapters and build menus, plus create three music videos. Hit OK, wait a few minutes, and you're done. The chapters aren't determined with any real smarts; they just appear at intervals, but since they also include visual thumbnails on the menu page, they do help you pick your way through, say, an hour-long birthday video.

Adding multiple VHS items to one DVD is easy, but you lose the YesDVD features. (The option simply goes away when you add a second video to your working disc.) Even without YesDVD, the menu that's created can be helpful: an orderly list of the videos you've transferred, with thumbnails pulled from the first frame of each video clip.

Video quality is GoVideo's big claim here, and I won't dispute that. In a world of DVD and high-definition broadcasting, it's hard to make VHS look good. Still, I didn't notice any quality degradation as the video migrated from VHS to DVD, and even feel comfortable saying that, if you need a longer-running video, feel free to play with lower quality settings.

Talking about quality brings me to the subject of, well, subject matter. Home videos are the most obvious candidates for the transfer process; Hollywood movies are trickier. Because of copy protection, most big-studio VHS movies going back to the early 1990s can't be transferred to DVD. Smaller independent studios almost always release videos that are free of copy protection, however, and the same goes for many TV programs and special interest stuff like exercise videos. If you think about it, it actually turns out OK: odds are that you can copy most of the obscure stuff that won't make it to DVD, or lower quality things you don't necessarily want to buy on DVD. On the flip side, the original Star Wars movie—which seems to have had copy protection built in since the very dawn of copy protection—looks so great and sounds so amazing in its latest DVD release, you shouldn't feel embarrassed or cheated about buying it, and making George Lucas a few dollars richer.