OK so not to get into any legal arguments etc. I back up all my kids purchased dvds so they don't destroy them..which they do to the copies hence the reason for this question..

Which distro can rip and burn dvds consistently, with the least hassel. I have a windows box i keep around just for this reason and I would like to put *nix on it, however I cannot give up this functionality for the reasons above. So which is recommended?

Any distro will. The major problem when ripping/burning CDs/DVDs is usually caused by the drive not being able to read the disk, not the distro.

not to disagree but do you have source on this ? I would like to see if my dvd drive falls under this catagory... and what hardware i may want to look at purchasing if this is an issue

The reason I mentioned the drive problem is because sometimes one of my computers has a problem reading a disk but the other reads it perfectly. If you're using the same hardware and you've had no problem under Windows then you shouldn't under Linux.

Linux is linux is linux. While it's true that the one with the latest kernel will probably have the best selection of device drivers, but the DVD player, itself, shouldn't matter as that's just hardware, not a device driver. In any case, any distro can be upgraded to the latest kernel. So, linux is linux is linux.

any distro will do it, so find some new distro that you like and suits you.

Debian Development

Use a known name brand CDs and DVDs. Use a name brand CD and DVD burner. Choose a burning program you like - I prefer Brasero for a easy no hassle burning - K3B is too much for me. I Prefer the simple GUI of Brasero.

Gentoo

Keep in mind that there are many different CD-ROM and DVD formats out there and older drives may not be able to read the newer formats. A CD-ROM will not read a DVD. A DVD-R may not be readable in your DVD drive but a DVD+R will be readable. DVD Dual Layer is only available on the drives built in the past several years. Of course, Blu-Ray is not readable on a regular or DL DVD.

Check your hardware to find out it's limitations before blaming the OS.

Most distro's have a repository you can go to that have packages precompiled to enable DVD playback. For example Packman & VLC for SuSE, and Livna for Fedora core. Any disto should be able to burn a DVD. I prefer k3b. The K3b setup will also tell you if you need to install other packages as well.

As already stated, there are different kinds of DVDs and not all or then may be recordable. It depends on the drive you have. I've run into this problem at work when the wrong brand of DVD was ordered, and I couldn't use them for backups. This is using Windows.