Back up my Dvd's to a external harddrive and playback through my PS3

[confuten1]

Ive spent several hours educating myself on aspects of decrypting, encoding and diffrent file types. With that being said Im still unsure of the best way to playback High quality video files with 5.1 surround sound through my PS3. Ive read that PS3 supports(sort of) divx files now, but we are still waiting on a future update to actually playback the files, should i start decrypting dvds now and wait for PS3 to support divx play back, or is there another format native to
ps3 (mpeg1, mpeg2, h.264 mpeg4 avc, mpeg4 sp) that I can use now while maintaining the best picture quality/resolution and minimum 5.1 audio. If you have a suggestion, I would greatly appriciate it, and if you could include a list of the software that is needed to acomplish said task. Please note that i am new to this stuff and if there is multiple ways/ software to acomplish this, the path of least resistance/ techinical know how would greatly be appriciated.Thanks in advance.

[odyssy]

My understanding is that the PS3 now supports divx.

I don't have a PS3 (so the instructions here might not apply), but I do have an XBox 360, and here's what I did:
1) Decrypt the dvd using dvd decryptor (use "ifo mode" under the mode menu to get only the main movie).
2) Convert to divx using autogk (select the .ifo file produced in step 1 as the input file)
3) Put the output .avi file into a 'movies' folder on my computer.
4) Share the 'movies' folder using Windows Media Player 11. (tools-options-library-configure sharing)

So long as there isn't any tricky copy protection on the DVD, this works like a charm.

I think for the PS3 it's even a bit easier, as you can play the avis directly from a network share instead of going through media player.

[confuten1]

Since my first post, I was able to play divx through PS3. I will try your method and let you know the outcome. Thnx