ok, I have followed the instructions here http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/494836 with the exception I saved the image to the hd then burned to dvd, it playes in my plays in my player fine. I however not able to play the iso file on my hd with jrmc or powerdvd, should i not be able to?
is this the correct way to rip an identical copy of the dvd to hd for backup?
Don't know about those other player's but VLC is free and play's iso's. Yes, that's the correct way, there are payware solution's that are probably faster (don't know) or combination's of each. There's AnyDVD which replace's DVDFab and FixVTS, uses FixVTS, I think. CloneDVD replace's Shrink and ImgBurn but neither AnyDVD or CloneDVD are free, in fact, AnyDVD has just instituted a yearly update charge. DVD Shrink and ImgBurn are excellent though so is DVDFab and FixVTS. You could look into VobBlanker to fix and remove part's too instead of FixVTS but quite a bit more complicated.
if you have daemon tools, Alcohol 120%, virtual clonedrive, or something similar you could use that to mount your iso on your computer..and then play it through windows media player(basically making a virtual dvd player)
After reading many more posts on this subject I guess in order to archive my dvds I simply need to use anydvd or dvdfab or such to rip to my hd then I can run it through fixvts to clean it if I so desire. From that point I can play the vts file in either player I have. Then if I need to make a new copy of one of my movies I simply open shrink and grab the files on my hd to create an iso then burn it to a new dvd? I have several that my littleones wear out from repeated use or scratch and I am getting tired of replacing.
My next question is about creating a library for them. I have found a few posts but have not found a real good way to create one that will have an image on the folder. There was reference to mymovies I think that is used with microsoft media center and it appears that jrmc is talking with them to make it compatible with their software. Are there any other options?