I'd like to get a few choice scenes from my Simpsons DVD collection that can play with Win Media Player so I may email to friends. I was thinking of using DVDShrink to trim away everything but the scene I wanted, but what is best convert it so my friends don't need to install a DVD player program to view it??? Oh, and it would be great if this conversion program was free!!
There are any number of ways to do what you describe; one method would be to convert the entire DVD chapter to an AVI, this use something like VirtualDub to break up the AVI into the sections you want.
Start by ripping the DVD VOBs that you want... on a season disk, there are going to be multiple VOBs, and usually one per episode. If you are not sure which VOB corresponds to which episode, rip all of the VOBs (you can ignore the small ones... i.e. 250 MB, etc) and play each one (just the VOB) in a software DVD player; this will tell you which VOB is which.
Once you have the correct VOB, you will need to convert it to AVI. (I know there is a handy guide on this somewhere around here). There are many freeware programs that do this; my favorite is DVDx (freeware). DVDx will allow you to convert a single VOB into just about any format you want... just note that there are a number of settings in DVDx and so you may need to play around a bit to get the best AVI. Choose "Open MPEGs" to import your VOB, make sure you choose "AVI [...]" on the Output Settings window, and generically you are ready to go. Note that DVDx will allow you to convert just a segment of the video, but I really would not suggest editing that here.
Once you have the AVI of the entire episode, jump over to VirtualDub and dub out the segments you want; generically you select the video portion you want by using markers (Mark In/Mark Out) and then hit "Save as AVI".
If you are new to either program, you are going to need a guide (probably)... each program has a number of settings you are going to need to set.
