I have been going through my DVD collection and ripping them to HD for use on my Vista Media Center.

Film DVDs are easy but when it comes to TV Series DVDs I am stuck.

For TV series like "24" I want to create a file per episode. Then be able to play these episodes through Windows Media Player.

I have tried using DVD decrypter to rip out each episode to a VOB file. Then I have renamed the .VOB to a .MPG.

This is almost there but I cannot use Fast Forward etc.

I have also tried using MakeMKV, but the MKV files created only play though VLC and not Windows Media Player.

Are there any other suggestions on what I could try?

If you want fast forward to work you will need to convert to DVR-MS or WMV

Thanks for the reply.

I have found another solution that works but isn't quite a slick as I would like.

First I use DVDDecrypter to rip an episode to a VOB file.

I then use VOB2MPG to convert the VOB to a proper MPG file that supports fast forward etc.

Its not slick because you need to repeat both steps for each episode, so you can't leave the computer batch processing the entire DVD.

Its a shame but it works.

I like using Vault 360 to rip DVD's to disk.  It's a little annoying, because it only lets you rip them to it's default folder, but once you find it you're OK.  It also allows you to re-encode the videos to various formats for different portable video players if you wish, or you can just rip in original format which will leave you with one MPG file per episode.

There's a free trial version on the website, give it a shot.

I use MakeMkv (http://www.makemkv.com) to rip all episodes from a DVD to individual MKV files without any loss in quality (no compression at all).
Alows you to select audio sub streams you want to keep, is extremely fast, and resulting files play nicely under Vista MC.

PierreLo

Yes I have tried this but the resultant MKV files will not play in WMP or Vista MC.
I can only play the files in VLC?

m4rky:

Yes I have tried this but the resultant MKV files will not play in WMP or Vista MC. I can only play the files in VLC?

That is a codec problem. ffdshow should be all you need. VLC has inbuilt codecs you see, so it doesn't need codec packs. WMP (MC uses it to play stuff) needs codecs to play non Windows friendly video files.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow

Hi,

This is only a codec problem. As nick said, install ffdshow, or Haali media splitter and you're good to go. All my movies are in MKV and play fine in VMC.

PierreLo

If you do go the mkv route just don't expect to play them on an extender without using Transcode 360.

Finally got around to working out why the .MKV files that MakeMKV created would not play.

I installed Haali Media Splitter (with all the options unticked) and they now work a treat :-)

Why take so many steps when video redo takes them straight to dvrms and they play back perfectly?

Using MakeMKV is a single step? It took around 2 minutes to rip 6 episodes from DVD to 6 MKV files last night.

All I had to do was rename the files to .SxxExx.MKV and I was done.

I wanted to keep the video and audio lossless and don't use any extenders so no need to convert to DVRMS.

Can't get much simpler. :-)