Through out the past 4 years I have been trying to get all my DVD’s converted into Digital Media that I could easily stream to various computers or even to my TV, without paying a lot of money.  Being a Network Engineer I figured this task wouldn’t be that difficult….but alas, it has.

It all started when I decided .AVI was my format of choice, it seemed it was the format that would last the longest and it was the most widely accepted at the time.  At first this was working fine, converting DVD’s went fairly well;

1. DVD Dycrypter converted the DVD to a usable form
2. Random tools would take the largest .VOB file and convert it to the .AVI format ready to play
3. Stream said file to any computer in the house.

Now the problem with the above is;

• Will not stream to a TV
• Could not stream to XBOX to stream to TV
• DVD structure was always changing, so movies started using multiple .VOB files and soon you had to merge 6 different .AVI’s to get the full movie.

Since I am a gamer and the XBOX 360 came out, I decided to persue using the 360 as an extender to Windows MCE, but this required I convert all my DVD to .WMV rather then what I had been doing and then hoping that I didn’t get screwed in the long run by choosing that format.   This in itself proved to be difficult, and still didn’t address the the fact I had to merge multiple .WMV files to get the whole DVD, so I decided to research using other tools to convert the DVD’s to .WMV and I stumbled across AVS 4in 1 video converter which is able to read the .IFO file which stores the entire DVD structure and is able to create one file out of it, this was awesome.

So at this stage I am starting over and moving all my DVD’s to .WMV, since I can stream to my TV and watch any of them on any computer in the house, even the Linux computers.  But I am still running into the occasional DVD that just won’t convert correctly, either the sound is off or the subtitles are missing and that is a still something I need to work out.   Maybe since the XBOX 360 is adding support for other formats I will try to see if they convert more consistanlty.