I have been digitizing my VHS family home movies. I have about 40 VHS tapes and most of them I have been able to digitize with my Hauppauge 150 PVR MCE Card using Mythtv. However, for some reason some of the tapes played poorly when played in a VCR hooked up to my computer. For these tapes, I had to use a DVD/VCR recorder to copy the VHS tapes to DVDs. I have done this, and now I want to rip the DVDs into MPEG-2 files onto my Debian Etch Linux Computer so that I can edit them. I want to rip them to mpeg-2 so that they do not lose any of the quality of the video. I have read on the Internet that you can make the .vob files into .mpg files just by changing the file extension to .mpg, but I have also heard that doing this will prevent you from editing them in video editors. What tool or program do I use to change the .vob files to MPEG-2 files in Linux and still be able to edit the video later?