The first time you fire up dvd::rip, you'll need to change a few settings under "Edit"->"Edit Preferences". The settings that I had to change were

The cool thing about the preference setup is that each tab has a "Check Settings" button that will check all of the settings and tell you whether you have an acceptable value for each one.

Now we go to "File"->"New Project" and give the project a name. Next we switch to the "Rip Title" tab and click "Read DVD Table of Contents". This gives us a detailed list of of tracks, times etc. so that we can select which ones that we want to rip. Usually, track one is the meat of the movie that you want to rip. You can select the track and click "View Title" to view it in mplayer and make sure it is the one you want. If so, click "Rip Title" and wait.. wait.. wait.. It usually takes quite a while and a lot of disk space to rip the contents of a DVD. Be patient and make sure that the "Default data base directory" you configured above has plenty of free disk space. When the ripping is done, we'll skip right to the "Transcode" tab. There are many many other things you can do with dvd::rip, but that is beyond the scope of this quick introduction. If you notice at the top of the tab you see the "Selected DVD Title".. this is a little confusing, but you are operating only on the title that you selected in the "Rip Title" tab. If you want to transcode another track, you have to go back to the "Rip Title" tab and repeat the process leaving the other title selected when you move to the "Transcode" tab. Now when I encode movies, I like to select the xvid codec. I also like to set the target media to be 1 700MB CD. This allows me to burn the movie to a CD, but it does cut down on the quality. I have a crappy old TV, so it really doesn't matter, but if you have something nicer, you might want to use something higher, or just use dvdshrink, which we'll cover in a minute. The next thing I do is to select AC3 for the audio track. Basically this leaves the audio uncompressed. This is the only way that I've found that I don't have problem with the sync on the audio and video on any of my computers/devices. Now if you want to make a test run of encoding on a small sample of the movie, you can fill in a beginning and end frame in the "General Options" eg (1000 and 3000) and it will encode only those frames to allow you to judge the video quality before you spend a long time encoding the entire movie to find out that you selected some bad options. Once you have your options set, click "Transcode" and the wait.. wait.. wait.. When it's done, click "View AVI" and see if it turned out the way you want it, keep or adjust your settings, remove the beginning and end frame numbers and click "Transcode" again for the final product. The avi file that's produced will end up in the project directory at the path "avi/track_num/project_name-track_num.avi".