OK, here's the story....

I filmed a live music show several months ago, and produced a DVD for the artist at that time, in SD using Premiere Pr and Encore. I removed the original .avi files from my hard drive to free up some space, but have a copy of the DVD.
The artist contacted me last week and wants me to put several clips from his DVD up on Youtube. This is all original material, so no copyright issues. Anyway, I thought "no big deal, I'll rip the dvd back to my hard drive, import the .avi, make my cuts, encode to flash, and then post". If only I was so lucky.
My first hurdle was ripping the DVD. I have a free trial copy of MagicDVDRipper that I have used with success in the past. Unfortunately, I used up all of my free trials. So, I tried downloading a different free DVD ripper. I found several, but they all either left watermarks, only ripped 3-5 minutes, or required all kinds of codecs and plug-ins to work.
This where I think my problem started.
So after I tried all these programs, and then uninstalled them, I got the bright idea to download MagicDVDRipper on my wife's computer, plug mty external drive into her computer, and rip the DVD from there. Worked great, but now when I try to import the .avi that I created, I get this message from Premiere:
"Unable to import file, unsupported audio"......
So, I looked at the .avi file, and under Properties, in the audio section, it shows "lame mp3" as the audio format. All my other .avi files are PCM. What is happening? Premiere still opens all my other .avi files with no issues. Also, Windows Media Player will play the .avi file that Premiere won't. Is there an easy way to correct this? Or, is there a better way to rip DVD to avi using tools I might already have? I have Adobe CS3 on a Windows XP system.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

First, you don't need to rip the DVD if it's not protected (I'm assuming not since you produced the DVD). I use PgcDemux (PgcDemux - Video software and downloads - VideoHelp.com (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/PgcDemux)). Open the .IFO file and extract the video as an .M2V and the audio (likely .WAV or .AC3). That should give you usable files.

I've also had good results just renaming the .VOB to .MPG. Depends on what type of audio data it contains. If there's only one audio track, the usually works.

I knew there had to be a better way! Thanks, I'll try your suggestions and let you know how it works out!

I don't know if it will help, but you can download the free Lame encoder here: Audacity: How do I download and install the LAME MP3 encoder? (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3)

With it and the free Audacity progam you can convert to wav, etc. / Battle Vaughan

I wonder what caused the audio to encode as lame mp3 in the first place? I had MagicDVDRipper audio set to PCM......and I have never had this issue with MagicRipper in the past. I hope that one of the other rip programs I tried to download didn't change some obscure setting somewhere that is going to cause me issues in the future. Where would I look to verify this?

As mentioned, you should be able to have the choice to Demux the audio and video...If the option is there to decode to Lame.mp3, it should be available for uncompressed .wav also.

If your using CS4 then you can just copy the .VOB files and re-edit from them. Easy.

I mentioned that I'm using CS3....not so easy.

I copied the .vob files from my dvd, and renamed them to .avi. Now, when I open the newly renamed files in Premiere, I have great audio,, but absolutely no video! What am I doing wrong??

If you don't have the video in avi you probably don't have the video codec installed that made it. Might try backing up a step, demux your video in mpegStreamclip (excellent freeware) and convert with it. (Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows (http://www.squared5.com)) / BVaughan

But, I made the DVD on the same computer, using Premiere and Encore, captured from a miniDV tape. Why wouldn't I have the codec for the video?

I don't have a definitive answer for that, someone else jump in here, but I have noticed that Premiere does not always recognize some avi's although I apparently have the codec installed that Visual Lan, for example, will use. How PPro decides what codecs to use I haven't a clue.... /BV

Based on my past experience, Premiere is unstable with mpeg files. You might be able to work directly with the .vob files... you might not be able...

One thing I noticed: you renamed the files to .avi - you should rename them to .mpeg. Maybe PremPro is trying to interpret the file as .avi while in reality it's an .mpeg file.

Converting to another file type using MPEG Streamclip (a fantastic freeware!) might be an option, but with every conversion you loose quality.

If all you need to do is cuts, then I would use Streamclip, cut at the nearest keyframe (ctrl + k), mark your in/out points, and save the sections as mpeg, then upload them to Youtube - you should have no issues as YT accepts mpeg files.

The beauty of this method is the preservation of full quality - there will be absolutely NO format conversion.

The only thing you might have to install on your PC (unless you already have QT Pro) is QT Alternative, a specific version, for Streamclip to work with mpeg files (DVDs) - the free QT codec does not have mpeg support.

I hope this helps,

Converting the .vob files to .mpeg was the trick! Thanks so much for everybody's help!