Would someone give me a shove in the right direction?

[hiwatt25]

I'm so new to this DVD on the computer thing I'm not even sure what terms to search when searching the forums so I'm hoping someone can help me get started.

What I want to do is backup maybe half a dozen DVD's on to the harddrive of my laptop for trips out of town but I'd like the file sizes to be as small as possible, (the ISO's I create are very big and so I can't have more than 2-3 movies before I start to run out of space).

Is it possible to convert the ISO's to another smaller format and if so what is that called and is there a guide for that here? Or do I have to make ISO's at all? Also, I'm watching on a laptop so quality is not a major concern.

See what I'm sayin' I'm not familiar enough with terminology to even know what guides to look for. I just want to watch Basketball on my way to Tampa.

[Bodyslide]

Read This:

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd_to_ratdvd.cfm

[Nelson37]

For smaller filesizes, you could convert to XVID or Divx. Or, you could reduce the bitrate, or resolution and bitrate.

An easy to use tool for the newbie would be DVD2SVCD. This would cut movies down to 1.8 to 2.4 gig each. They remain MPG2. You could also try DVD2VCD for further reduction, using MPG1.

For PC, there is no real advantage to staying with MPG. I'm sure there are similar tools for Divx and/or XVID, I just am not familiar with them.

Divx and Xvid are compression codecs which do not play in most standalone DVD players but are intended for PC playback. They give greater compression with better quality.

Note that in virtually all cases, filesize reduction equals quality loss.