There are many commercial programs available to allow you to convert a DVD to an AVI, though I will make quite a bold statement, you will not find any commercial program to convert a DVD MPEG file to an AVI that gives you 'better' quality than that of the many freely available alternatives. It's all down to how much energy you are prepared to put in. So buy a product that does most of the thinking for you, doesn't give you many options, and gives you a somewhat poor finished AVI file or, spend vast amounts of time learning all the different formats and options to get the best out of your conversions. avi.NET requires Minimal user intervention but still delivers excellent quality results. avi.NET will allow you to load in both MPEG-1 (VCD) and MPEG-2 (DVD/HDTV) files and convert them to AVI. Whether it be DivX or XviD that is chosen as the video codec, the resulting AVI file will be 100% standalone player compatible. It should play in your home dvd Avi Player just fine.
Using avi.NET is simple, select 'IN' and load in your movie file, usually a VOB or MPG file. The file will 'INDEX' (process will take a couple of minutes) and once completed you'll notice many options have automatically been set and the movie is playing, you can now select 'ADD' to add the job to the Batch list.
