[ale] Ripping DVDs to ISOs- advice? and hdmi question.

[david w. millians]

Okay, the media solution is pretty much in hand.

I've got the audio ripped to flac, and am playing it back with squeezeboxes.
I've got an acer aspire revo (nice MCE remote/IR combo at MicroCenter 
btw, only about $4 premium vs. newegg- back in the back by the laptops) 
doing xbmc video to the tv. Played 'big buck bunny' at 1080 as a test- 
over 100megabit it lagged *just* a bit in a few places. Gig or on disk, 
no lag whatsoever. Perhaps NFS vs. samba might be better, but the 
majority of things are dvd, so...
(And I have a debian server to hold all this.)

Now I've got to rip the dvds to the server, too. I've been using dvd 
decrypter to get them ripped, but some newer than that are failing. (I'm 
ripping to iso to get subtitles and everything just as normal; it's 
better than the alternative, even if it does take more space.)

So, any other solution? And why is this necessary, even? Why can't you 
just use DD and be done with it? I know they're encrypted- is there 
something in a dvd player that enforces this and all data must flow through?

HDMI. I'd like to get rid of multiple cables, so I hear these work 
great. I also heard rumblings by somebody who couldn't get his audio to 
work right so he wound up using analog. So, does it work if I'm using a 
stereo to play all the hdmi audio, with it sending the signal to the tv? 
I hear that hdmi 1.4 does something with sending the audio back from the 
tv; that need confuses me. Basically, I don't want to buy a $600 
receiver and discover that it doesn't work right.
If I got an HDMI receiver, it would free up a squeezebox to use 
elsewhere, since the xbmc could play audio, too.