Is there a way to rip an unprotected DVD back into MPEG-2? I'm not trying to do anything illegal. I just have a few DVD's of old work that I never thought I'd need, but I may need to put their content in another reel. Thus I somehow have to get it off the DVD in a format I can use, without much quality loss. Is this possible? I've seen programs that can rip them to MPEG-4 or XVID or other formats that do not help me, but not MPEG-2. I just want the MPEG-2 file so I can just throw it back into DVD Studio Pro and create a reel. Without completely killing the quality. Any suggestions?

Don't know about how DVD Studio Pro deals with that but for example you can reauthor DVD with Ulead Movie Factory. Try to feed your authoring software straight with the DVD material.

Of coarse you can simply copy the VOB files to your hard drive and rename them with .mpg (instead of .vob) extension.

Daniel: the files ALREADY ARE in MPEG-2!! They just have the extension .VOB.

So if you rename them to MPG it might already work. If not the program cannot
read a MPEG-2 system/program stream. You need to de-mux the file into its
seperate audio and video streams.

Go to http://www.doom9.org/, click on downloads

Then go to the "VOB Tools" section, there are de-muxers there. Like bbTools.

This will extract the .m2v (MPEG-2 video file), wav/pcm/ac3/dts files (audio)
from the VOB files, as long as they are NOT protected!

However, if you just want to re-use your main movie. Get the VOB file, rename
it to .MPG and your authoring program should accept it! The only problem
might be if your movie is over 1 GB on disc your, it will be split in 1 GB chunks
(which you then need to merge together first).