Get Thoggen, and leave your DVDs at home

The fact that it relies on Gstreamer is a minus point... perhaps when someone finally makes Gstreamer not crash pathetically when faced with anything it doesn't quite like (4 years and counting)... then perhaps I'll consider it.

I use DVD::RIP (http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/), and it does a pretty good job. It's essentially a front-end for Transcode (http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode) -- a command line tool with perhaps the most brutally complicated man page and options I've ever seen. I've spent the last couple of weeks arguing with it and trying to grasp its fantasically arcane options syntax. Nonetheless, Transcode is a magnificent swiss-army knife that'll convert anything to anything and perform all kinds of tricks, filtering and manipulations along the way.

DVD::RIP puts a front end on Transcode that is specifically designed for making the ripping of DVDs easy. It works pretty well. It's written in Perl -- and that's a problem, since I would dearly love to contribute to, but can't stand Perl -- and it has a nice GUI interface that's straightforward for the most part.

Ripping a DVD with DVD::RIP is a fairly simple process -- though, IMO, it could be much simpler.

You can get a DVD::RIP rpm (for Fedora) from the freshrpms repo (http://freshrpms.net) (along with its Transcode dep). It's definitely worth a look.