want to put dvd's (on hdd) in format that Media Center will like. What video format will give me the highest resolution, in comparison to DVD, and also maintain 5.1 sound, that WMP will play, mp4, avi, wmv, etc?

thx,
df

Use divx encoding - that is avi format

I would use Xvid for video and AC3 for audio.

You could also just save your DVDs as ".iso" disk image format files, and use a DVD emulator such as (freeware) Alcohol52 to play them. This is probably the easiest way to do what you seem to want to do. That way the high-quality and all features, menus, sound formats, etc are maintained in their original data...no de-coding/re-encoding which may degrade quality. I've tried Alcohol52 on XP MCE2005, Pro, and Home and it worked fine on all three. The Alcohol52 CD/DVD "drive" "looks" and works just like any other CD/DVD drive to the Windows OS.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=5273

I suppose if you wanted, you could even compress the .iso files or save them in a compressed folder to save space and decompress each one before mounting and playing it, but that would add an extra step and time to the process.


edit to add-Alcohol52 also supports Nero's ".nrg" DVD disk image file format. It may support others as well.

edit to add-Just thought of something else...this is strictly to save disk space. You can also use freeware DVDshrink32 (or other DVD "re-authoring" program) to cut-out those features you don't want (like subtitles, foreign languages, etc). Now you might think that DVDshrink32 since it is designed to compress DL disks down to an SL size, would reduce video quality...but there's a trick. You can manually tell DVDshrink32 that your DVD is actually larger than the standard DVD. So you can "re-author" your disk, get rid of features/extras you don't want, and still save the whole thing WITHOUT any compression. That will reduce its storage space requirements by sometimes as much as a couple of giga-bytes, and you could then create a smaller ".iso" image. Other "re-authoring" programs probably let you do something similar as well, but DVDshrink32 is freeware and pretty reliable.


sorry about multiple edits: a major pain-killer day again.

McFly said:

Is AC3 surround sound?

AC3 is Dolby digital surround. You can find encoding/decoding codecs here:
http://ac3filter.net/

john albrich said:

I can play the dvd files with power dvd, that's not the issue. Windows Media Center does not though so I wanted to convert them to another file format that would save some space (not a lot, I want them to be high quality, and I want the surround sound) and be playable with media center.
thx

Damon F said:

MCE/WMP plays movies from a drive emulator perfectly fine.

That's where the drive emulator comes in. MCE will treat it just like any another optical drive, so it doesn't matter what player you use, PowerDVD, WinDVD, WMP, etc.

In Windows Explorer, it looks just like any other physical optical drive and is assigned a regular drive letter. The difference is that instead of inserting a physical disc, you "mount" a virtual disc (the .iso file) and instead of playing from your physical optical drive "D:" or "E:", you may find your application playing from "drive L:" or something higher up on the alphabet.


As for reducing the total storage size, again that's where re-authoring comes in and you lose NO quality as long as you don't de-code/re-encode or compress the data with a lossy compression routine.

What you will be doing if you change format to some other codec, will be de-coding and re-encoding the data. That can reduce video quality and sometimes reduces audio quality.

One example of reducing storage space with NO loss of quality: I took a DVD that originally required almost a full 8gb of storage. That included all the menus, the features, the alternate languages, etc. I "re-authored" the DVD and kept ONLY the main section and the surround sound audio. Without ANY compression at all, it went from 8gb to 4.5gb. The original source had filled the disc with so much crap it required a DL disc when all the main material actually required was an SL disc. And, that was before I even considered using any file compression like Windows compressed folders option, or 7-zip, or WinRAR, etc.