In my continued research into how best to go about digitizing my movie collection and making it more accessible than it currently is (binders full of DVDs aren’t too accessible) I’m reconsidering my position on storing the movie as ISO and might now just copy the VIDEO_TS folders to a drive instead. (I like DVD Decrypter for this.)

It turns out that both MediaPortal and My Movies for Media Center will support ISO playback using Daemon Tools, but ISO doesn’t work for Media Center Extenders like the Xbox 360. Ideally you’d just store one copy of the movie, but with ISO not working, saving ISO would mean having to save two versions of it - the ISO and a MCE-compatible version. Talk about space usage.

My Movies has a document talking about which format to store movies in (they recommend VIDEO_TS over ISO) and the Xbox 360 as a media extender. Turns out Transcode360 can handle VIDEO_TS now, too, so from a “lossless” standpoint, it may be that VIDEO_TS is the way to go.

You can even burn VIDEO_TS to a watchable DVD later, which was my original notion of saving the ISO - so if the original DVD gets corrupted or scratched, I can re-create it. The only thing I don’t know is how the various audio tracks (commentary, etc.) and extras (menus, behind-the-scenes videos) live on via VIDEO_TS and/or manifest on the Media Center Extender.