All the guides I can find here seem to deal with burning DVDs onto backup disks, which I don't want to do. Sorry if I missed something else in the stickies, but here goes:
We have quite a collection of DVDs, but our DVD player broke recently.
We got hold of a multimedia server, so what we plan to do is rip 'em all to that and have it set up so that it can be accessed wirelessly throughout the house. Then we can watch all our DVDs anywhere, including on the TV by connecting a laptop to it via HDMI...
At least that's in theory. What's the best way to rip the DVDs? I want it to be as easy as possible, for the non tech-savvy members of the family. (Which means no ripping as .isos and mounting them with a virtual DVD drive :()
I want as good quality as possible, as good/better a picture than a DVD player would output on our 42" Plasma.
Just rip the disc and be done with it then. You will have a VIDEO_TS folder which contains the video that you can play with most any PC player available.
I have all my archive of AVI movies (and all my music too) on hard drives along with a load of recently burned dvd movies. I have a few (old type) xboxes on the network around the house which i use as multimedia machines (using the awesome XBMC), the xboxes stream any required media to whichever tv. The only thing that old xboxes can't do is HiDef content.
