I’m taking a long road trip with my wife and 2 young daughters, and wanted to convert some DVDs to MPEG on CD for them to watch on my (albeit old) notebook in the car. Alas, I don’t have a DVD decoder on my PC.
Can anyone recommend a freeware/shareware/demoware product that will make the conversion for me?
Thanks!
jay
download.com has some.
You can’t do commercial dvds though as they are encoded. What that means is that we can’t talk about that on the board 
In Linux ffmpeg is probably your best bet. Try:
ffmpeg -i FILENAME.vob -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -b 800 -g 300 -bf 2 -acodec mp3 -ab 128 FILENAME.avi
(Input from a VOB file, output to an AVI file with MPEG-4 video and MP3 audio. B frames are used so the MPEG-4 stream is DivX5 compatible.)
I’m not sure about Windows I’m afraid. You could try looking at the two sites listed below for some free software that might meet your needs:
download.com
WebAttack.com’s Multimedia Section.
TMPGenc can work directly on the VOB files from DVDs and encode them to MPEG quite easily. The sticky issue (at least as far as this board’s rules and the current laws [the actual process is easy]) is copying the VOB files from the DVD - that is, ripping the DVD. There are many programs to do this, but, of course, I can’t mention any of them here.
I recommend going to this fine site for all things related to video. This is serious business that requires serious memory, disk space, and processor time. There are lots of nice tutorials there.
I second minor7flat5’s link.
It is the most comprehensive site on the subject of converting from one video format to another that I have come across.
Minor point: vcdhelp.com has now changed its url to dvdrhelp.com