Ok, this might be not in this league, but I feel pesronally that it has more to do with the tech side of things more than the anime side of life, as my question isn't about anime titles where I -must- have subtitles, but I do want the most out of backing up all my DVD's.

So i'm trying to find the most efficient way to back up all of my DVD's onto an external Hard Drive.

My perference would be to have it as one file, with it being as close to as exact replica of the DVD as possible (guess that would include menus, subtitles, etc.) while still shrinking the size, if allowed. If it were possible to have all of the features without shrinking, but not with, i'd deal with the size I think.

Now here's where the bad boy steps in. I have a PS3, and I want to be able to stream these bad boys over the network to either my PSP or . hell anywhere. To be able to watch em on the PSP via the external on my PC is the eventual goal.

To be fair, I've reached that goal. I don't have menus, but I finally have a single .avi file that has subtitles that the PS3 will actually recognize and switch to.

The problem I've run into is, while the PS3 recognizes this second "video" track and applies the subtitles to it, VLC doesn't. It recognizes the track, but switching to it doesn't give me anything but the exact same movie with no subtitles.

Now, I don't think it will ever be possible to switch between actual dialects (as in, english/japanese/french/spanish/etc.), but the subtitles seems to be something that can be done (and is done...), but it seems like I can either get it working on one side (before using AVIAddXSubs, I have an AVI and a .sub/idx that plays on VLC like a beaut, can change language, can add subtitles (i think?), it's close enough to awesome), or I get it working on the other (no language options, no subtitles in VLC, but the PS3 allows me to now change it.)

I've tried reading up. Half the people recommend .MKV, half of them say to switch the .MKV to .AVI. Half of them say to do what I did above, and now I can't tell if i'm stepping in the right direction, or in the wrong one. Half of them just say it's not possible. And the final half say that you're just not doing it right. There's a lot of halfs, and the best I've learned from ripping the same dvd 8 times now is that... media blows.

I guess my questions are mainly these:

1) Why would VLC show a second video selection (entitled en. Subs) and when selected on VLC, it doesn't make any change but when on PS3, it would (could this 'possibly' be because I'm leaving it as a .divx rather than renaming it to .avi?) ?

2) How do you guys store your backup dvd's on your computer. Your preferred method to share your media around.

3) How do you perfer to access it?

I have a spare laptop doing absolutely nothing, and a ton of DVD's I would really prefer to not start burning and then get almost done to find out that someone has this awesome method that makes it so I can watch em on my laptop, PSP, and some school computer streaming from home in a single file, which is what I wanted all along. Any suggestions? I have a really good feeling I'm going to get one answer:

You're on the wrong board, take it elsewhere

But at the very least, I'm interested in Question 2 before I go any further.