new to mac and DVD burning. Need help in VERY basic terms.

[new2mac]

After years of problems with PC's and lots of 'Mac fan' friends I have finally got myself the new 17" powerbook.
I've created some DVDs with my Phillips stand alone DVD recorder but would now like to take advantage of iDVD to make them look nice.
I copied one of my homemade DVDs to my desktop but was left with video_TS files which iDVD will not accept.
Is there any way of importing the stuff on my homemade DVDs into iDVD without purchasing any new software?
If not, what do you recommend I purchase to allow me to do what I can't at the moment.
If you could help I would appreciate it in as simple terms as possible.
Thank you.

[caipirina]

not sure how much i can help .. but for other potential helpers:

what is it that you actually want to achieve ???

creating a backup of your home made DVDs ?? (find the backup the backup thread here ... basically it says use Toast, a must have mac software for burning everything)

Or are you actually trying to bring it into iDVD for further DVD authoring ??? in this case I guess you need to re-rip the stuff somehow ... that would be quite some work ... hope someone has a better answer for you

and WELCOME to the wondeful world of Macs !

[jchansen]

iDVD will not work with external burners. You will need to purchase DVD Studio Pro if you want to author dvds with an external drive.

Once your video is on a dvd, it is difficult to extract for editing, and you would lose quality if you then reencoded it. But if you want to, the simplest thing would be something called DVDXCopy.

Consider buying an MCE superdrive which is internal, and will work with iDVD.

[tgpo]

DVDXCopy.

Is there a mac version of that?

[ps2daddy]

You need toast to burn the video ts folder

If the folder is too large you can use a program like dvd2onex to decrease the size then burn using toast

sorry I reread your post you can hook a firewire camera up to your dvd player via rca jacks and record the home movie then import it into imovie via firewire and then export to idvd

[caipirina]

just found THIS of versiontracker.com
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19483

claims it can extract stuff from DVDs into .mov ... may help

p