Serviio

I'm pretty green when it comes to this stuff.
I'd like to rip my DVDs to my PC so I can stream them to my blu ray player and store them. But I want to do this without compression.
I can rip to an ISO but my Samsung blu ray (C5500) cannot play back ISOs.
I can rip to MKV using DVDFab8 but it's compressed.

What else can I try?

Rip to MKV

dont worry about the compression with modern devices and with a quality ripping program they are not an issue.

http://www.matroska.org/technical/guides/dvd/index.html

Well, i always use this DVD Ripperto help me rip DVDs. It enables u to rip and convert DVDs to any other video formats including MKV without compression.

Good luck

So I suppose, DVD video were in MPEG2, and were wrapped into MKV container?
But I'm not sure that DLNA renderers (like Sony or Samsung,etc) supports MKV with MPEG2 video codec, only h264/AVC are supported...

With Samsung a series C tv the way I do it is to strip the vobs without the menus then just run the vobs as a sequence which the TV will do from the remote tools button. With Linux there is the option of concatenating the vobs into a single mpeg2....I do not know how to do this in the windows world. But if you can strip the vobs with the dvdcss intact then it is fairly easy to create playlists for the sequence then run the playlist as the movie with having to worry about whether or not your renderer will work from a video ts and use the menu correctly through a dlna server.

I have all the I Claudius stuff, Elizabeth R (Glenda version!) Rome and some other classic stuff on hdd so I do not have to wear out my disks just to watch a particular episode. I keep the originals safe! Seeing that they are getting harder and harder to get...the same as high quality recordings of The Columbia Symphony, The New York Philharmonic, Moto Perpetuo conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and so forth...and so forth. Apple and itunes can go take a flying xxxx

@Mugwump -- can you please elaborate on creating a playlist of VOB files? How do I create a Video Playlist?

I have a Samsung UN50C8000 and BD-6900. I would like to run the playlists on my BD-6900.

Thanks,

Rohit.

I wonder if someone can elaborate on the best way to rip DVDs for playback under Serviio. By 'best' I mean a way that keeps as many of the features of the original DVD as possible - ie. best picture & sound quality, fast foward/rewind, chapter forward/back, switch subtitles - and of course remove all the annoying crap like region codes, advertising, copyright notices etc. and of course the ripper should not be confused by copy protection mechanisms.

So far I have experimented with Handbrake (Linux & Windows) and WinXDVD Platinum and had mixed results with both -

Handbrake provides the fastest rips, with good picture and audio quality (I use the MPEG-2 FFmpeg video setting with QP2, frame rate as source, constant quality) and good audio quality. Subtitle tracks can easily be selected, audio gain can be increased, but Handbrake is sometimes confused by copy protection mechanisms. Also bad is the resulting .mp4 files can't be fast forwarded or rewound on Serviio, and the chapter information is gone despite Handbrake saying it would preserve it. Actually ffmpeg -i <file.mp4> shows the chapter information is in the file.

WinXDVD Platinum has the easiest interface to use - 3 clicks to a copy - and this way produces the best video quality and the audio is also fine, and I've not seen it stumble on a copy protected DVD yet, however in this mode there is no control of the audio gain (some rips come out very low level, not good on the tablet) or subtitles, and the chapter information is gone. Switching to the manual MPEG settings unleashes a world of trouble - the audio quality is terrible (tested on the Bourne films, that need a particular subtitle track to make sense - the audio level was very low, and speech was in left channel only) and I just can't get it to rip with the same picture quality as the preset Copy setting which produces a 5Gb rip. Serviio will fast forward and rewind the resulting .mpg file, but no chapter forward/back.

Ripping I do on an Asus X53 Core i5 laptop running usually Ubuntu 12.04 or Win7 which I usually run in VMware Player. Serviio is running in a VMware ESXi 5 host on a Core i7 machine running Ubuntu 12.04 Server with 16Gb RAM, the VM has exclusive use of a single core and 1Gb RAM. My TV is a Sony Bravia KDL-55EX725BAEP. I know as much as the next man about computers but am a bit green with all these media formats so any hints how to get the best DVD rips would be much appreciated.

makemkv and dvdfab platinum are my choices

Thanks for the tips, both look interesting. With the resulting rips do you manage to fast forward/rewind the files, and can you skip between chapters? I'm trying to figure out if something is wrong with my Serviio setup, the rips, or if this stuff just isn't possible even though it seems like pretty basic functionality.