Well I will start this off by saying that I like acidrip for what it is. A very simply GUI, which rips DVD's quite well with only a few clicks.

Now on to my question I have ripped two DVD's using acdrip today and neither was close to the filesize that I wanted.

For the first I set a target size of 700 MB, the second a target size of 1400 MB. The 700 used only a single pass, the 1400, double pass. mp3lame for audio and labavcodec for video.

The final sizes of these were 590 MB and 1050 MB respectively.

So my questions are.....
1) Is this a fluke and my bad luck? or are the target sizes more just "a suggestion"?
2) Is there anything I can do to more specificly set the filesize?
3) Perhaps something I am doing wrong?

Don't get me wrong here. The software is great and both DVD's turned out perfectly fine with acceptable quality, I just want to pack as many bps as I can for top quality at ~700 MB.

yeah, well how long are these tracks? if they are quite short then you can easily end up in the situation of the codec not needing the room. if the first is an hour or more though then you should be getting just under 700mb (mine are ALWAYS between 683 and 686mb - the diff from 700 being the abr mp3 rather than using cbr - see mencoder docs) if you could send me the ifo files from one of these dvd's i will have a look. just email every single *.ifo file in the video_ts directory.

The first track is 102 Minutes, the second 200 Minutes. (700 and 1400 respectively)

I don't mind too much, as I said, the quality is more than acceptable. Just curious if I was doing something wrong If you would still like the IFO files, I'd be glad to send them over to you.
Let me know.

well yes, if you start encoding one again, and stop it, then send me the log file (click the down arrow in the bottom right corner) and the ifo's and i'll have a look. I could guess that the bitrate is being set wrong, possibly via an error in finding the audio bitrate.