Transferring DVD footage to laptop

[naturegal]

I'm the webmaster at a national wildlife refuge where we have a live bald eagle cam. I've been taping video from the cam monitor using a VCR, and then using a capture device to get the video into my laptop where I can make short video clips for our website.

I'm thinking about going to a DVD recorder so I can get the feed in digital form from the start. I won't be copying the DVDs or adding menus or anything like that -- just importing the DVD footage into the computer, editing it, and then creating short MPEG or WMV files for the website.

Before buying a DVD recorder, I was curious if there are certain issues I should know about that might trip me up if I try to transer the footage from the burned DVD to my laptop hard drive (via my laptop's DVD player). Up to this point, my experience with DVDs has been limited to just playing them.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[theewizard]

the DVD vob files will have to be converted to mpeg for editing, all though there are some programs that will import a vob and let you edit/cut the part you want and then output to mpeg, the vobs will be 1gig each ( average) , but done correctly the picture quality should be better

its likely you will need another program to convert to WMV

there are programs that will take dvd's and convert to avi dvix or xvid or wmv, but i have never used them

[tinker]

There is TMPGEnc Xpress which will import DVD files and there you can do all the editing you want and export to DVD, WMV or DivX.
Check there web sit for specifications
http://www.tmpg-inc.com/en/index.html
There is also Mpeg Video Wizard DVD, but I do not know if it will export to other than DVD format, you can edit VOBs in this one.
Before you get recorder, check what format it output.
Check this for info on recorders.
http://hometheater.about.com/od/dvdrecorderfaqs/f/dvdrecgfaq1.htm

[naturegal]

Okay, thanks to you both for the good info.