Home movie dvds to pc conversion

[slimmx]

Hi,
I had some "PAL" hand held Sony camera tapes from the early 90s converted to "US" dvds in local video store. I was very surprised how good the quality was even on 46 inch tv. The guy who converted the videos made a separate dvd for each tape. I want to rip those home movies to my computer so I can back it up on my hard drive and combine some of the movies to fewer dvds. My question is to what format should I rip it to and which software I should use? I don't want to lose video quality. Also, I want to edit some of the videos by taking out some of the bad footage and create menus on dvds. Can someone please suggest which software I should use? I don't mind spending some money on it but freeware would be perfect.

Sorry if this question has been asked before but every conversion thread I read didn't seem the same as my project.

Thank you,
Max

[guns1inger]

Use VOB2MPG to create mpg files from the DVDs. No encoding, so no quality loss.

Use Womble Mpeg Video Wizard DVD to edit and combine the files, again without re-encoding.

Author to a DVD structure using your authoring tool of choice (GUIForDVDAuthor or DVD Styler are free)

Burn to quality media with Imgburn.

So long as you keep the final running time of each disc to a reasonable length (and therefore the file size to within a single layer disc) you should have no need to re-encode the video at all using the above process.

[slimmx]

Thank you guns1inger, I will try it on the weekend.