So your camera does have Firewire. If your PC doesn't have Firewire, you can get a PCI Firewire card from NewEgg.

S-video is analog. I can't tell you how much degradation you will have in the video, but there will be some because of the conversion from digital to analog and back to digital. If you don't think that you will ever want to edit or splice or make any changes to the raw video from you tapes, and the video quality is acceptable to you, then just hook the camera to your DVD recorder via S-video. If you think there is even a remote chance that you would want to edit your videos or add music or titles or whatever, then I suggest that you copy the digital data from the camera to your PC for storage. That way you have the data stored with the best possible quality, and it can be readily edited on the PC.