I'm a noob. I think I've got two prooblems.

1) I've downloaded mplayer and transcode and dvd::rip. I'm trying out dvd::rip for the first time. I get as far as actually transcoding the video to avi. I get an error log that says on the bottom:

...
[transcode] warning: (encoder.c) loading video export module failed
[transcode] warning: failed to init export modules
[transcode] critical: plug-in initialization failed

exactly what package do I need now?

2) For packages I'm going to "deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main" but some of the stuff I need doesn't seem to be there, or the versions are wrong... Is this possible? What if I cannot find something like XviD? Is Xvid called xvid in debian package-speak, or something else? if it's libxvidcore4 then I have it already... any help would be apreciated!!!

I hate to do this. I was looking at the dvd::rip output and noticed something else. Here is a more complete listing of the message.

...
[transcode] warning: (dl_loader.c) loading "/usr/lib/transcode/export_divx4.so" failed
[transcode] warning: (encoder.c) loading video export module failed
[transcode] warning: failed to init export modules
[transcode] critical: plug-in initialization failed

does this help? should there be a single package I can download to fix this?

Find out first if /usr/lib/transcode/export_divx4.so exist. If it does, re-install dvd::rip. If it's not there, find out where it is, if you're sure it's present on your system and adjust the path for dvd::rip (either changing the dvd::rip config-file or creating a sym-link to /usr/lib/transcode/export_divx4.so from the location you've found it)

Can't you install it from a package manager or something? Smart is good if you want to change the one debian uses and dvd:rip is not at the repositories.

Now If you want to do simple stuff like 2 clicks away from an xvid file out of a dvd.
Try dvd2xvid, I installed it yesterday and worked nice and easy with simple gui.

Thanks for the advice. I checked for the file "/usr/lib/transcode/export_divx4.so" and it wasn't there (or anywhere else) but there was a entry in the directory for an xvid codec and a divx5 codec. I went to dvd::rip to the 'transcode' flap. Xvid worked when I tried it as an 'output codec'. I guess that solves problem #1. For problem #2 I'll look into smart. I'll look into dvd2xvid too. Thanks again for the advice. It is always apreciated.