Best Quality for media player HELP!!

[Antiquities Muse]

ok I need help.

What I am trying to do is back-up my dvd movies onto my external hard drive. So my 4 young kids can't scratch them up but so that they can still be watched at the best quality possible.

What I have:

Argosy upconverting media player w/hdmi cable & external hd,

50" Panasonic Plasma 1080


The media player will read the dvd folder that dvdfab put out and I have all the menu options during play and it will play files over 4gb.

My Question is...

What are the best quality video settings to use, there are so many options and I am getting a bit confused...I would appreciate your thoughts..

Thanks

[signals]

If you are backing up the DVDs to the external hard drive as DVD (VIDEO_TS) folders, the only setting that will effect the quality is whether to compress the content to DVD-5 size or leave it set for DVD-9 (which preserves the quality of the original disc). If you use Customize mode, you can choose to leave off some extras or audio streams that you don't want on a given disc which will reduce the size of the output files without effecting the picture quality. If you don't want or need the menus, choose Main Movie mode or Remove Menus in Customize mode to further reduce the output size slightly.

[GregiBoy]

Also, from a quick read of the specs of this device, it appears that it will play XVid AVI files.

This means that you could use DVD to Mobile to produce a file just over 1Gb that would give you pretty good quality.

Give the generic.avi.xvid.audiocopy profile a try. Use 1100 Video bitrate and a resolution width of 720 or 704 (PAL or NTSC) for your first trial and see what you think.