I’ve been looking at ripping my large DVD collection to a media server and streaming it to a couple of rooms in the house. Ripping the DVDs themselves has proved straightforward enough using DVD Decrypter but getting a useful encoded MPEG or AVI file via Xvid has proved a little elusive. Having tried several commercial and free programs and getting files which haven’t sized or clipped properly or have the sound missing or garbled, I came across a gem of a product.
Handbrake is a “open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows” and via a simple interface it allows you to encode a previously ripped DVD from your hard drive into a high quality AVI using several encoders, in my case Xvid/MP3. After a timely update by the author, a few bugs in the queuing system were fixed and now I can rip several DVDs to the hard drive and then queue them up to encode overnight.
It should only take a few months to get them all done 
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