I can't speak firsthand, but have been looking into setting up to preserve hundreds of hours of video, and it is possible--Even as we speak, the TV is running ads for consumer Phillips stand alone device does the job(and is really expensive) but your idea is just as good--

Recordable DVD's are really expensive though(they hold a huge amount of data), and I understand that, due to the high cost, a lot of people save their analog videos as MPEG-2 files and copy them on to CDs instead--Since most DVD players also handle CDs, they are just as useable, the difference being that the MPEG-2 files don't have quite the quality of the full fledged digital video files(I am told that this is often not noticable when you copy from analog video tapes)--