DVD Ripping: Need Help & Advice

Hi, first off, before I begin, if you know of a specific online forum that deals exclusively with issues of DVD ripping and conversion, I would appreciate a referral. I have a feeling there might be a better place for this post.

Anyway, here's the deal. I am an English professor and I am preparing a video on
Shakespeare. I have done this before,
but have run into some minor technical glitches.




This presentation involves ripping movies from various DVD's,
then converting them and reassembling various scenes from them on a single
DVD. Again, I am not a total newbie to
this, but a bit of a technical novice.



I did this last year and produced an amazing video. I am trying to use the same tools: DVD
Decrypter for ripping, and AVS Video Converter for conversion to either AVI or
WMV.




Here is the problem.
I can successfully rip the files no prob with DVD Decrypter. It's a snap.
However, when I go to convert the video files using AVS Video Converter,
this program cannot "see" the ripped video files.




To be more specific, the rip copies more than 20 files
successfully. The large video files are
VOB files, 0.99 in size, labeled VTS_01_01, etc. These cannot be found using AVS Video
Converter, even though I know they are there.




A little more background: I am not a techie and have a slow
learning curve. I would prefer to stay
with these two programs, if at all possible, since I know how to use them. It took months to get comfortable with them. Also, I am limited on budget. If I do have to switch programs, please try
to recommend a quality freeware solution, or something low-cost.




So my questions are:

1) What
the heck is going on?

2) Why
can't AVS Video Converter see the large VOB files?

3) Are
there any settings I can change in either program to fix this problem?

4) If
I can't fix it with these two programs, what similar, low-cost tools might help
me make this video?




Thanks very much in advance for reading and responding to
this post.



CharmedLife417