DVD to AVI
 

Hi,
I have quite a few DVD files that I'd like to convert to AVI or DIVX format to reduce storage space.

I used to use Dr. DivX on windows. I couldn't find anything for doing the same on Linux. Anyone got any suggestions for a newbie user friendly software (did I forget to mention Free as well!) for the same?

Linux Archive

GNU/Linux prefers free formats like ogg/theora (compressed video).
You can usually convert the VOB files ripped from a DVD using ffmpeg2theora.

There are usually packages for multimedia file conversion in your distros repos.

I prefer mencoder, which comes with mplayer. You can pretty much covert anything to almost everything.

dvd2avi
 

How about dvd2avi?

check here:


cheers
Rafal

Chech this:

How to backup your DVDs (in dvd, xvid, mpeg-4, x264 formats) using k9copy

The cool thing about FOSS is that all the programs share their codebase. Everything which handles non-free as well as free codecs and container formats tend to borrow heavily from the ffmpeg stable.

mencoder, like mplayer, uses ffmpeg, is very powerful if you want to do actual authoring.

dvd2avi is a gui front-end for mencoder. Drawback is that it uses MSs avi containers. Freedom-honoring folk discourage this use in favour of Xiph.org "ogg" containers.

k9copy uses ffmpeg - but it needs KDE4 (at least the Qt dependencies).

Basically you choose your poison.
mencoder will let you, transparently, specify ogg/theora format - don't know about the others. ffmpeg2theora uses the same processes as the others, without the overhead of supporting non-free things. They are both non-gui, so they can be used in scripts for large jobs, and their processes can be specified in a transparent fashion. Also requires typing, which, I realize, some people eschew in favor of a mouse (what is the younger generation coming to...)

Most of the other suggestions are also rippers... the free ripper of choice is DVD::RIP, which also shares code with the other projects. It is also very likely already packaged for your distro and in the repos.

There are lots and lots out there ... google for "linux dvd authoring".