I have a friend who is a university psychology lecturer. She has several DVDs that are used in teaching which are recordings of live sessions. However, because they are in DVD format they are awkward to use in lectures if you just want to show a couple of minutes (or even a few seconds) of video. She would like to be able to extract short video clips from the DVD to use in PowerPoint etc.

But here is the problem.

She has a University supplied laptop so cannot install any other software on it.

The DVDs are confidential so she cannot allow other people (i.e. me) to see them.

Is the there a Linux Live CD that comes with the necessary software to rip and convert the DVD to AVI or similar so it could then be edited in Windows Moviemaker?

mencoder should be able to do this, ubuntu to whatever should come with mencoder on it, i think

mencoder dvd://0 -dvd-device /dev/dvd -alang English -info srcform="null" -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:v4mv:vqmin=2:vbitrate=730 -vf pp=de,crop=0:0:0:0,scale=480:-2 -o "file.avi"

I'm quite positive ffmpeg and mencoder are available for Window$ and I've seen them used effectively from MS-DOS prompt. So you could use that.

DVD::Rip is also a very good all-in-one program:
http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/

Thanks for these suggestions, I will give them a try and report back.