I've still not found anything to beat the old Hauppuage PVR250 / 350 series of analog TV cards for capturing video from tape. They were unusual in having hardware real-time MPG2 encoding and decoding chips, which made the whole thing much more efficient - and overall of better quality. If you can find one (they were PCI cards) grab it.
Otherwise you need an TV card or video capture card with either an analog ariel input, or else with S-video / Composite-video inputs which can be fed from the tape drive. Note that synchronisation usually works better if you can input the sound to the capture card, rather than the audio card and directly embed it into the MPG2 stream