Editing Video from DVD in Premiere 5.1??

Hi there ...

Can anyone give me pointers on how to capture video
from DVD archives that I have and in a manner that will
result in files that are editable via adobe premiere 5.1?

I have archived about 40 hours of DV footage to DVD
and no longer have the original DV tapes, just the archived
DVDs.

I've tried various means of capturing the video from the DVD's
to my disk, but invariably the resulting .mpg file or .avi files
don't work with premiere, some sort of wierd codec anomaly
usually prevents me from working with the files.

So far, for capturing from the DVD's, I've tried XMPEG and
nero vision express. Both methods are working well insofar
as extracting the movies, but I haven't been able to work
with anything in premiere.

Any tips would be appreciated .. thanks

joel.