I want to get video from dvd on my computer, into an editable format such as mpg2 or preferably avi, in the most efficient lossless way as possible. The dvd's aren't commercial, they're home video dvd's so there's no protection or anything like that on them. What's a good program to do this?

Vegas lets you do this directly. I am sure some other NLEs do also.

dvd's are already mpeg2, but it's in a vob format... maybe try downloading the 30-day demo mpeg editor at www.womble.com, see if it'll open vob's, and export 'em with the mpeg name, without re-encoding... i believe that it will work with ac3 audio as well.

very few editing programs will truly edit mpeg2 in it's native form, without re--encoding the entire sequence, which wrecks the picture quality.

On the Mac side, you can use a freeware tool called MPEG Streamclip.

http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

I used it to convert some video clips shot with those DVD-Camcorders to DV for editing.[It also does other types of conversions including to AVI]

Of course, after editing, you will have to recompress/reencode the DV back to MPEG-2 for making a DVD.

I recently used streamclip to effectively tear apart a dvd and edit and recode.

I tried a couple of different methods but none worked nearly as well.

DVD to streamclip to FCP to WMV (client wanted WMV)

Lewis

DVD Decrypter.

Best regards.
Arnaldo

Also DVD2AVI.

More and more editors are supporting it directly. Avid Liquid 7 just added that feature too (vob edit).

Also DVD2AVI.

The original DVD2AVI had unfixed bugs. You should now use DGMPGDec (http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdec/dgmpgdec.html), which is DVD2AVI with a bunch of bug fixes.

You can also edit the contents from a DVD directly from within your editor without any sort of conversion using the method described in this article: How to frameserve DVD/MPEG2/HDTV to an advanced video editor (http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=261416)