My mom has a home business doing stuff like that for customers, and for the past few weekends, I've been coming home from school and commandeering her equipment to do our own tapes before they disintegrate. I'd say it's definitely worth it. I'm only 20, and the tapes of me as a baby are already starting to get bad. There are static bars across the bottom, and the color has faded A LOT. The old reel-to-reel videos from the 50s and 60s that my mom does for customers actually look better than the 20-years old VHS tapes.
As far as doing the transfers yourself, it's definitely something you could manage on your own. You need a VCR, a digital-analog converter (this can cost anywhere from $20-$200 on ebay), the right cables, and some kind of video editing softwhere (we use Adobe Premiere Elements, and it's pretty good for the price ($99 new), or Pinnacle Studio, which is a little cheaper, but not quite as good), and DVD-Rs. The Adobe software allows you to brighten your video, which has helped our tapes a ton, and to increase the brightness of the colors, which is good on the old, faded tapes. Depending on how many videos you have, the cost of equipment to do it yourself is probably less than getting it done professionally, and you're able to add titles and custom menus to it, or clip out the 15 minutes of tape staring at the ground when someone forgot to turn off the camera. The biggest issue is the time involved. All of the downloads are in real-time, so if you have a 2-hour tape, it takes that long to get it on the computer. Depending on how much editing you want to do, it can take an hour or two to work on the video and set menus and titles. Then it will take at least a couple of hours to burn each DVD, depending on the length of the video and the speed of your computer. Overall though, I think it's worth it to do it yourself. I added up what it would cost us to do our tapes if we were paying for it, and it was over $3000. It's worth it to get them on DVD whatever the cost though, because the tapes are only going to get worse the longer they sit there. Plus it's just plain fun to go through and see all the old footage. Especially on our tapes because we literally have hours and hours of tape from our many Disney trips. My dad taped EVERY single Disney ride and show ever. It's fun to go back and see Horizons, World of Motion, the old Figment ride, the old Country Bears show, and other stuff I remember as a kid.
PS, I know that was long-winded, but I hope it helped.
