I have some home-video on DVD (no, it's not pornographic ) that needs to be edited - let's call it "raw footage" - I need to cut some scenes, move them around and maybe add some background music. I used to do similar things several years ago with .avi files using Adobe Premiere, but I'd like to know do I need to rip the DVD first, edit the footage and then make a DVD again or is there a tool that will allow me to edit the footage without compressing it (ofcourse, I'd like to keep it in best possible quality).

You could probably still do that with Premiere.

You should be able to do some simple editing without having to re-encode the files. Rip the DVD and then load those VOB files into an MPEG editor, then re-author the edited MPEGs back to DVD. Re-authoring without re-encoding should preserve the original quality. There are several tools you can try for this, I listed two with guides below. Hope this is of some help.

MPEG Video Wizard
http://www.videoforums.co.uk/guide-edit-vob-mpeg-48.htm

Cuttermaran
http://home.hccnet.nl/g.van.schaik/e-editing.html

Tnx CLeTuS Exactly what I had in mind! Gonna try these suckers when I get home