DVD to ??? - What is the best for pic and sound quality i.e. avi? divx? etc

[tyders]

Apologies for the basicness of this question but i was wondering if there is a big difference in the quality if i rip a dvd to avi or mpeg etc?

If there is which is the better format to do it to and what in your opinions give good results. im looking to put it on a multimedia player to play through my tv.

any advice would be appreciated. thanks

[bits]

It really depends on what your goals are and what you find acceptable in terms of video quality.

If you have lots of HDD space then leave it as mpeg, no re-encoding, no transcoding ect..... I have a media player and enough HDD so this is what I do.

If you want smaller files then you can either go with lower bit rate mpeg or go with DivX or Xvid or WMV. To maintain high quality you will still need to maintain fairly high bitrates even with avi, not as high as mpeg but still fairly high. Also, keep in mind that unless you have a very fast pc you will have significantly long conversion encoding times unless you have something like the Plextor Convertx. The TV you will be viewing these files on will make a difference as well. The bigger the TV the better the quality will need to be for example.

Personally I think WMV is the best quality for a given file size but it is very slow, very long encoding times. If I do convert mpeg to avi I use the He-3 DivX codec at between 1.5 and 3.0 Mb/s

My suggestion is to list out your goals/constraints and go from there.