I know that I usually show you how to do everything from the command line first, but in the case of ripping DVDs, understanding their layout and probing them for information is a pretty tough thing to do from the command line (at least making sense out of the information you get is pretty tough), so today we are going backwards.. Simple GUI, to a little more complex GUI, to command line.

Now there are two approaches to ripping your DVDs. You either want a "as close to original" backup copy that will fill a common writable DVD or you may want a highly compress or scaled down copy of a DVD that maybe you can put on a smaller device like a portable video player or put on something like a writeable CD or a USB memory stick. The first application that we will cover "dvdshrink" is mainly good at the first scenario (original backup copies). The next two applications "dvd:rip" and "mencoder" are better at making those size-customized versions of your movies. This is not to say that you can't use these applications in other ways, or even any other of the numerous applications available in other ways.. this is just how I've found them to be useful so far.