I'm still exploring this myself, but I see there are 2 main pieces to the puzzle:
1. Archival Storage
Assuming you're source media is a DVD (which it probably is), then I'd recommend ripping the DVD to an decrypted VOB file. This allows you complete access to all parts of the DVD (chapters, subtitles, multiple sound tracks, etc), and preserves the quality of the DVD video. The one downside of this is that the files will be large, rougly 5G or 6G per movie. For this ripping I've had a lot of success with cladDVD (that's actually the old name of the software, but I forget the new name, search for cladDVD and you'll find the new stuff at their homepage).
2. Playable Storage
After (or instead of) creating an archival storage, you'll probably also was a format that is readily viewable. Although you can play the VOBs directly in MC, you can't play them in too many other places (like a portable player, or a Windows Media Center client, etc). For this you'll probably want to convert to some normal/simple format like MPEG or DivX or WMV. Here it get's a little more difficult and I haven't found a really good program yet.
Probably the one I've used to most is FlaskMPEG. It hasn't been updated in a while, but it works well in general and especially with DivX. My biggest complaint is that it doesn't work natively with Windows Media Encoder. In the past when I wanted to convert to WMV I converted to a very high quality AVI (via the highest quality that DivX supports) and then converted that file to WMV. The problem with this is that DivX doesn't support 5.1 sound, but WMV does, so I lost the better sound. Also it meant I had to convert twice, which is a pain and time consuming.
If anyone knows of a good VOB to WMV converted I'd love to hear about it.
It'd also be really nice if MC could convert VOB videos to a normal (MPG or AVI) format on the fly. I'm not holding my breath yet, though.
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Topic: OT: Lossless Video Storage (Read 877 times)