I have read through the man pages and tried everything I could think would work and I have yet to get an episode that doesn't jump to an estimated 1000 megs. These are just gundam wing episodes that are 24 minutes long and dvds(obviously) but they just won't rip without being gigantic unless I put them to a really low bitrate or leave it at default and that quality isn't okay. I wouldn't complain had i not had some episodes I was given that were aprox 100 megs and looked great. A explanation of the factors that really matter in a rip to make it look good but still compress well would be greatly appreciated as I havn't been able to find a good guide on google. A command line that works great would also be fine with me.

do man mencoder and u can see that u can tell it to stop encoding wehn the file size reaches a certain amount,
u can also put the bitrate down really low
eg
mencoder dvd://1 -ovc lavc -oac copy -lavcopts vbitrate=100

I care more about quality then file size, as long as the size is around 150. However, I get some blockiness with that size and I think my bitrate is at about 8000. I can live with how it is, I was just hoping there were some options that gave better compression of good quality video, but I will live with my current command line that I use.

u can up video compression and lower sound compression if that helps any
vbitrate=800 is default, abitrate is how to control audio, dont know its default, is in the man pages