What to I have to do to play a dvd in windows media player it won't reconize the format do I need to convert the file back to wmv to play it and if so what is the simplest way to do it?

Get the appropriate codecs. You might even consider using another player instead which has in-built codecs. CODECs list and alternate players for Movies

BTW the WMA & WMV file formats are not very good. Also the WMP player is not so good. I'd recommend looking elsewhere. Many people use WMP because M$ package it with the Windows system & such people don't know any better.

Most of the link is french to me. What do you recomend I use?

VLC & MPlayer

I downloaded the VLC player and it works fine.

Good to hear. We also recommend to get MPlayer just as a backup. There's a couple of odd things one can do but the other can't.

Such as?
I also found a way to change a dvd file back to avi.
DVD Ripper Wizard works pretty good

MPlayer can play individual VOB files, wma, real. More information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPlayer
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/info.html

VLC info http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html

Good to hear you found another utility. You might find more here http://www.videohelp.com/tools
You don't want to convert a video file too many times. Each time you convert it, it loses a lot of quality.