I made this a linux story, but that's not really fair. Because this is Mac OS X's story to. It's about me finally ripping DVD's. I tried every hack, app, applet, and script out there and I'm finally satisfied. I use mencoder universally. Read on...

I'm not even going to post detailed instructions. Mencoder dvd stuff is all over google. You'll figure out how quickly. The nice thing about mencoder is it's unified.

My only DVD players are apple laptops w/ OS X. I use mplayer there to extract the vob files as one unencrypted vob. This is an mpg 1 or 2 video stream and an AC3 audio stream. You'll have to tweak with the options to get the right title (means movie chunk) out of DVD's.

I put that VOB on the linux box. There I used a three pass video processing (with mencoder) that ultimately produces an AVI with an MPEG4 video stream and an MP3 audio stream. OGG would be better for the audio, but I don't feel like it ubuquitous enough yet. As long as I have my original DVD's though I can always reformat them for the latest codecs.

Then I just setup a cron job that process any unencrypted VOB files in a certain directory. It runs the three pass encoding to create 3 versions of the VOB; a really nice one, a decent CDROM sized one, and a masturbatory-turbo PDA sized one.