yea im a total noob when it comes to this, but i wanna back up my dvds onto my external hard drive so i can bring it to other places along with like a hundred other movies that i... found. so what programs are pretty simple to use for a newbie like me, any help is... well... helpfull, lol,

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=dvd+to+avi

Come on man.

well thanks for the smartass reply but i already did that. i just dont know which program is best for someone with no skills or knowledge of video formats and such. what i was asking is what is one of the easiest user friendly programs that does all that thinking for you... i know theres gotta be one where you dont need a fucking college degree to understand. you know, something like 'click, click, process taking place, another click click, voila'.

didn't mean to come off as an ass hole, sorry if it sounded that way. but another question, is there a way to get around my encrypted dvds. theres gotta be a way... you know any program in particular?

Read the first link. That is as easy as it gets, really.

What do you mean by "encrypted"?

well when i tried it with this program AVS Video Converter, it said that this video contains copyright protected content. sorry i thought it meant encrypted, but either way, is there a way to get around it.

every dvd i try with this, whether its rented or one of my own, i get the same message. somethin aint right, maybe im just using a bunk program and theres a better one out there. i just would like to know which one to get without having to download dozens of different programs to find the right one.

http://www.wikihow.com/Rip-a-DVD-to-an-AVI-or-MPG-File-Using-DVDx

you might have already seen that if you searched google, but i don't think its going to get any easier than that. I mean....that's still pretty simple since it gives you a step by step guide to doing it. (and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on there. Simple input/output settings, some codecs, and that was about it)

the easiest ones cost money, which is what I've found after a quick search on google. But the link above is free i think.

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/dvd_ripper_software/

^^^$$$

well shit, whats one of them really good easy as hell to use programs that you pay for. particularly the most popular one.

http://dailyapps.net/2008/08/hack-attack-how-to-create-axxo-quality-dvd-rips/

I had this same problem a couple of months ago. Its called DVD authoring programs. I don't know about Windows but for Linux theres a good one called DeVeDe thats what I've been using. They let you make menus and set the aspect ratio and all that kinda shit too.

It takes ages to convert videos into DVD format so don't wait on it. For a 700MB movie it takes me about 2-3 hours to convert into an ISO file ready to burn.

I was wondering the same thing as op, but a little more specific. Right now I am using DVD43 and Handbrake, but what can I do to rip the files and have the output be ~700Mb like aXXo rips, or many other rips found in torrents?

I used pinnacle studio to "import" aka rip from a DVD, then cut out everything i didnt want, then exported the project as an AVI, which takes up a bitchload of space.

dvd shrink to go from dvd to .vob

vob2mpg to go from .vob to .mpg

virtualDUB with xvid codec to do from .mpg to .avi

Does anyone know of a a program that can convert them into 300mb .mkv's?

I use Magic DVD Ripper, it's pretty fantastic. Torrent it.

I always used to start off with "DVD decrypter" http://www.mrbass.org/dvdrip/
then sometimes used "DVD shrink" http://www.dvdshrink.org/ to cut out the special scenes or w/e.
finally WINavi or dvdtoavi or a Imtoo programme should finish the job. http://www.winavi.com/

VLC does everything, including this.