Best Way to Save/View Movies from Hard Drive

[Foochey]

I searched for an answer to this, but couldn't find the answer so excuse me if someone has already asked this. I would like to rip some movies to my hard drive and leave them there and view them from the hard drive rather than from a DVD (putting together a mediaputer). Anyhow, I'm not sure exactly how I should do this and what program(s) to use and what format would be best for viewing. I really want to keep the movies in pretty high quality for the big screen and 16:9 format. Also, is there a good front-end program for playing movies from a hard drive....kinda like MusicMatch or WinAmp for playing movies instead of MP3's?

Thanks everyone and pardon my ignorance here. I do have most of the programs I think, including DVDXCopy, XCopy Plus, DVD2AVI, Smartripper, etc.

-Steve

[SIRCOOKS]

use smart ripper to rip the dvd, then use dvd2avi to change the vob file to avi..holla

[Bob W]

use smart ripper to rip the dvd, then use dvd2avi to change the vob file to avi..holla

Would it be better to go from DVD to mpeg2 to save drive space?

[Conquest10]

dvd is mpeg2.

[txpharoah]

For hard drive captures for computer viewing only, I like WMV (Windows Media Video format). I've got several dozen hours of CNN footage from the Iraqi War, all for research purposes, so it'll never need to leave my computer.

It's all WMV, captured on an ATI card. (FYI, the ATI WMV captures like to drop frame unlike my MPEG/AVI caps, so I grabbed MPEG1 and converted to WMV in Cleaner 5.1 - was real quick to convert).