Originally posted by: electrictroy
Originally posted by: KaryudoOriginally posted by: electrictroy"The first step to knowledge is admitting you do not know."

Remember that.

I did. If you'd stopped at, "I have no idea what to do with these *.bup, *.nfo, and other confusing files," that would be admitting you do not know, and I could live with that. But you continued with what I thought was the arrogant and condescending, "Why can't these LD rippers just use normal MPEG4/avi files that I can view with DivX Player?" as if LD rippers were somehow stupid for not putting things in a format you could understand. That's the part I took offense to. I probably shouldn't have, and I apologize -- it was early, and I didn't take into consideration the sorts of things I think and type when I'm frustrated, too. I still think an engineer should be able to do better on the self-education front, though. In admitting you don't know, you only really have to admit it to yourself. It's disappointing to me to see people with a similar sort of education as I've got being ignorant -- I don't think it makes the profession look that great (and this is a profession that doesn't look that great at the best of times). Sort of like a lawyer getting all confused and frustrated by the fine print on a sweepstakes entry or something. If expecting more from fellow professionals makes me an arrogant SOB asshole, well, I guess I'm guilty as charged.

You'll note that my post, however assholish, did answer most of your first questions.

BTW, unfortunately you can't just run out and buy these things. George Lucas has ruled that out. So downloading is pretty much your only hope. Or, if you are interested in the simplest possible way to get the material and play it at home, contact Rikter Blaksvn (you can PM him here, or visit his website) and for a few bucks, he'll hook you up with DVDs you can pop right in your standalone. I'll admit a nice monolithic XviD is certainly more straightforward to deal with than the arcane filenames of DVD. But DVD is so much more universal and flexible on anything but a computer, that it's definitely worth the time figuring out the structure and how to burn it.

If you're really interested in figuring all this stuff out (including how to deal with OGM/XviD/DivX/MPEG4/DVD/DV, and transcoding between them, etc.), I'd recommend heading over to Doom9.org. That's where the people who actually create the tools to do what you want hang out. And there are easy-to-follow guides galore over there, too. Highly recommended.