I've seen a couple of posts about this but were for DVD movies. I'd like to be able to take a TV series (ex. the Sopranos) on DVD and convert it straight to DVR-MS. Is there any way to do this? I'd like to cut out the step of converting the DVD to .avi/.mkv. Possible?

I'm actually working on a process that does exactly this, that I'll be publishing on Engadget HD, but in the meantime do this.

Rip each episode to a single vob with DVDShrink and name them The Soprarnos.S03E04.dvd.vob

Then download and installed DVRMSToolBox (DTB) and use my vob to mpg profile to convert them to mpg.
http://bjdraw.com/2009/04/05/how-to-automatically-convert-vob-to-mpg-and-dts-to-ac3/

Then run them through the mkv to dvr-ms profile built into DTB.

I used the above instructions -- everything works but the video seems a little jerky. Are you also experiencing this?

It costs money but VideoReDo can convert from DVD to DVRMS.

Actually I did have that problem. Sorry I totally forgot. The problem was the fact that the source isn't 30fps. I had to make a special profile just to convert the video. I'll see if I still have it.

I've not had any issues with poor video quality or playback issues (jerkiness).

- Rip the DVD using DVDFab, or DVDShrink.
-- Use the main movie on DVDFab to extract either the episode or movie only stream in the language you prefer
--- Don't "shrink" or compress the video, unless you need to! This only applies to DVDShrink like tools which will recompress the video streams

- Use VideoRedo to take all the VOB you just ripped and convert to .dvr-ms
--- The .dvr-ms is just a container in which the MPEG stream will be injected, it won't convert the video or audio, nor will it rescale it

The content will playback natively on the 360 or other extenders.

I've got a mix of Region 1 (NTSC) and Region 2 (PAL) content and it works fine for either on both the media center and the 360 extenders.

VideoReDo is nice, but it is far from free.

Using DTB it doesn't cost anything.

Here's a question, have you tried converting any DVDs that started out as TV Shows? These are the ones I had problems with frame rate, not movies.

bjdraw:

VideoReDo is nice, but it is far from free.

Using DTB it doesn't cost anything.

Here's a question, have you tried converting any DVDs that started out as TV Shows? These are the ones I had problems with frame rate, not movies.

I did all my tv shows and movies with video redo and batch processing without problems. It's not free but works great

It's $50 to $80 (not sure what the difference is) and it doesn't support h.264. Seems pretty steep to me just to convert DVDs.

Any way to do this to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray??

mmatheny:

Any way to do this to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray??

Nope there is a thread somewhere about people making them MKV's or WMV-HD files but you have to lower the bit rate below acceptable imho

mmatheny:

Any way to do this to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray??

it is possible to convert HD m2ts & mkv to wtv w/o transcoding video, audio will need to be converted to ac3.