Any way to get Media Center to play .ISO files? Best format to rip DVDs?

Hey guys.

I am looking at integrating my computer & all the media (pictures, movies, etc) on my NAS into my home theater and learned about all the functionality that 7's Media Center brings to the table.

I've been playing around with it & it looks pretty slick, except it does not seem to play .ISO files. I have a handful of DVDs that I ripped & converted to .ISO and Media Center doesn't even see them when I add files to my media library. This isn't a big deal as I haven't started ripping any of my DVDs yet, but I'm just wondering what the best solution is to play DVDs on my computer with Media Center.

The other option I was looking at is Western Digital's TV Live, but in the list of supported file types, .ISO is not listed. That doesn't mean it won't play .ISOs, but I don't want to find out the hard way - I'd prefer to know beforehand.

If I can't get Media Center nor that WD box to play .ISO files, I obviously have to look at another file format when ripping my DVDs - which should I use? Media Center has no problem "seeing" and playing some .VOB files I have.

And here I thought .ISO was a pretty universal file format....

What do you guys think?

Thanks!

 

I usually use MPEG 4 for converting DVD's
a very universal AV format. .ISO is more common for archival purposes and software applications

 

Does it retain the same quality as a DVD or does Mp4 compress the video at all?

 

you can give it compression or not, it is fully up to you

 

My Movies is good for organizing movies in media center.

Edit:
http://www.mymovies.dk/

Media browser is probably good too, but I've never tried it.
http://www.mediabrowser.tv/

 

Keep an eye on the forum rules guys. Any talk about how to infringe copyright and such is verboten.

 

The two software I mentioned are media management extension for windows media center, and they enable media center to play iso files. They can't be used to infringe copyright material.

 

Why not just rip to x264?

 

That's why I didn't edit your post. I've just seen enough threads like this cause us mods a bunch of work to clean up, so I wanted to nip it in the bud.

Personally, I use Handbrake to encode my videos to H.264 so they retain quality without taking up as much space as MPEG4 or MPEG2

 

Purist like keeping original movie menu and extra materials.

 

Think of ISO files as binary 'containers' that hold whatever digital data you choose to keep there. Any references to resolution and quality depend on the data, not the ISO container.

 

No. ISO is standardized format for a disk image. It contains a whole filesystem, not just data. It is a DVD/CD simply copied as a single file instead of being in a drive. Container formats are like avi or mkv, which can contain video and audio streams encoded in different codecs like MP3 (MPEG2-Layer3), H.264, MPEG4, MPEG2, AAC, etc.

 

a filesystem IS data, silly rabbit......... or metadata if you intend on splitting hares........

 

Yes. But it's not quite the same as what is commonly called a container format, which is relevant here.

 

H.264 is MPEG-4 (it's commonly known as MPEG-4 AVC or MPEG-4 Part 10).

 

MPEG4 used referred to simple profile/xvid as opposite to AVC, but nowadays the meaning seems shifted to h.264/avc.