Both the above require additional hardware either in your PC or the External DVD-Video Recorder

Home Video's or tapes recorded off the TV programs can usually be copied without any problems but purchased or rented copyrighted video material such as movies have macro protection encoded into the video which will prevent direct copying by causing the copy to flicker  & black out or pop up a prohibition message on your DVD-Video Recorder.
If you own the original VHS Video and have the copyright owners permission to make a back up of the tape it may be possible to use an in line adapter to remove the macro signal and then make a perfect backup. As backing up copyrighted material is a grey area I am not about to expand on this subject.

Your VHS Video player needs to be in good order with good tape tracking and I would prefer to use an SVHS Video player with S Video & Stereo Audio Output.

1: Copying VHS Tapes directly to a DVD-Video Recorder
The connections will be one of the following in preferred order

The recording time on a blank DVD can be up to 6 hours depending on the recording mode of the DVD-Video recorder. The 2 hour time is better quality than SVHS Video so there is no advantage of recording in any better quality, 4 hour recording is comparable with good quality VHS so I would recommend using this for the majority of your recordings. Recording tapes this way you will have various options for creating a title menu but once the recording has commenced it cannot be edited so make sure you commence the VHS playback at a point just before you want to start recording and start the DVD-Video Recorder at the desired point. Make sure you stop the recording at the end of the tape playback to avoid any unnecessary garbage at the end of the recording.
This method is by far the simplest way to copy your VHS tapes to DVD and DVD-Video recorders can be purchased for under £100.

For the advanced thrifty users you can purchase a DVD-Video recorder with a hard drive & even DVD-RAM record facilities which will enable you to record and then edit your video in situ. Such a DVD-VIDEO Recorder is the Panasonic DMR-HS2 reviewed here

2: Copying the VHS tapes to a PC via a Video Capture Card
The connections will be one of the following in preferred order

The actual connections will depend on the capture card and audio setup

The capture card will have some software with it and depending on the output format the Video captured can be several formats, The captured Video will need to be converted (if not already) to the DVD-Video format and then authored to a DVD-Video Title Set. This process involves using different Video processing applications and although  rather complex the final results can produce a professional looking DVD-Video and will suit applications such as improving old Wedding Videos
An easy to use Video Editing application is the TMPGEnc DVD Author 2 I reviewed