Looking for the best long term capturing and encoding format

[lymond]

Like many of the people on this forum, my interest is to capture my vhs tapes before they deteriorate. I've been able to capture and burn vcds from them with a noticeable quality deterioration, but that's good enough for now. What I'd like to do ultimately is capture the highest quality from the tape and save the data file for the day when I can afford the DVD writer. What setup and format do you think has the highest quality and also has staying power so that when the time comes that I can make a DVD I'm starting with the highest quality data?

[Sulik]

Capture MPEG2 @ 8Mbps, so you'll be able to burn it to DVD later without re-encoding.