Hi Greggpb
Excuse this longish post, but here's my experience for what it's worth.
[Ignore this para if you want] Just by way of background, to give you an indication that I'm pretty serious about this: I have spent over $4000 on video software of every type, kind, nature and sort. You name it, I've used it and tested it. Over the years I've ripped my (currently) 300+ DVD collection at least 3 times, and digitised my 1100 tape VHS collection twice. My entire CD collection is also ripped. I have 3 PCs in my den, which have worked for weeks doing this sort of stuff. I have two DatVideo A-D Converters, a Kramer matrix switch, 4 VHS decks and 3 DVD decks. I also have two MViX's (760 and 780), and the whole house is both wired and wireless, running 10 or so PCs (lost count) on Vista Ultimate (and one XP), with a WHS server in there somewhere... I've been into digital/desktop video from the very beginning, with my first serious investment in 1996 in a DV1000 broadcast-quality mp2 capture card at R25K. And AFAIK I do not have one pirated or unlicensed piece of software or media anywhere the "cloud's" 11TB storage here at home.
I have been through several generations of ripping / encoding technology. As you know, the whole idea is to squash DVDs down to acceptable file sizes at acceptable viewing quality. Always a compromise, and always a moving target. My first rips on PIIIs took a DVD to the 300-400MB range ... but improvements in playback & display technology meant these were pretty crappy on projector displays a few years later. So, with larger faster cheaper disks and CPUs, I re-ripped everything to MP4 at around 1-1.2GB per movie. Great. But again, if you have a fussy eye, the large plasma displays and HD projectors really need something better, especially in hi-motion and hi-contrast scenes. This time I thought about it carefully.
Two things were evident over the past 10 years:
1) Disks are getting larger and larger and cheaper and cheaper
2) Display devices are getting better and better
No end in sight for these trends. The technical and cost reasons for squashing video down to small file sizes (which always and inevitably entails a video quality loss) is diminishing with each passing year.
So, last year I decided to start again and this time simply converted the DVDs to ISOs. That way I lose no quality because there's no transcoding. Yes, the files are massive by today's standards, but in a few years they'll be pretty ho-hum. Also, I'm sure in 5 years time my display devices will be a lot better, and I don't want to again sit with media assets digitised at a crappy quality (even if it seemed spectacular at the time).
(For a while I tried an intermediate step of extracting the mp2 files, thus losing no quality, and stringing them together, but this was labour-intensive. In the end the additional work required wasn't worth saving a few gig per movie.)
Another advantate of ISOs is that the full DVD content is available, including supplementary meterials, chapters, sub-titles, etc. And a third advantage: it's much faster to extract to ISO than to transcode to anything else.
Even though the MVix 760 has a 750GB Hitachi Drive, and the 780 has a 1TB Hitachi, I now play video off the media server via wireless. The MViX, as you know, plays ISOs.
It works well.
If you still want to rip to smaller file sizes, my advice from long and bitter experience is as follows:
1) Use Nero Recode 2.5 or up to rip to MP4. Nero Recode is standard in Nero 7 and up. Use the Cinema setting. Set audio volume to High (in Nero Recode) and do a two-pass rip. Not many people know this, but Nero Recode includes the Ateme codec for full MP4 H.264 AVC complaint video. Do
not use Nero Digital settings as this includes proprietary extentions for chapter and subtitle support, and should be avoided. All things considered - for ease of use, automatic frame cropping, and outstanding rip performance Nero Recode is simply outstanding. I've compared it in detail to Fair Use Wizard (paid version, using DivX and Xvid codecs)), AoA DVD Ripper (paid), AutoMKV, DVD Decrypter (paid), DVD Fab Decrypter HD (paid), HandBrake (shareware), MediaCoder (paid), Video Redo Plus (paid), Xilisoft DVD Ripper Platinum (paid), AVS Video Tools ripper (paid), and a tons of other freeware apps. It's outstanding. But remember
not to use Nero Digital!
2) Invest in Slysoft's
AnyDVD HD (there is a trail version) - I bought the full version for $93 but I see they're offering 20% on a Halloween special. It includes lifetime upgrades. This lets you bypass 99% of DVD protection schemas.
Of course there are any number of free rippers out there, and more coming out every day.
You'd do yourself a disservice if you ignored Nero Recode.
Oh yes, and its files play beautifully on the MViX. I just renamed them from *.mp4 to *.avi. They also play in Windows Media Player, GOMPlayer, and everyting else I've tried.
