I also recommend Kino2/Mplayer combination.
I use the following script to encode from DVD and find it gives pretty reasonable quality and not too huge file sizes.
#!/bin/bash
mencoder dvd://1 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=200:abitrate=112:vhq:vpass=1 -vf scale=320:240 -ofps 15 -alag eng
mencoder dvd://1 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=200:abitrate=112:vhq:vpass=2:vb_strategy=1 -vf scale=320:240 -ofps 15 -alag eng
By the way, this isn't a typo, you need to run mencoder twice for two pass encoding.
+ You may want to try mplayer dvd://1 first to check that the track you want to rip is actually on title 1. - if you want to convert another file just replace the dvd://1 with the filename. The above script produces a file called test.avi which you can move to whatever name you want.
Hope this helps,
- Andy
