what is best dvd ripper for backups?

I have some dvd's that I want to make portable but without the risk of scratching them up in transport. what is a good program to make the movies aroun 700 mb and drop on a cd that if it gets scratched wont kill me in cost? any ideas?

Everyone has favorites. But you can narrow down your choices somewhat by first determining what device you intend to play them on. Many (but not all) DVD players can play video CDs, and PCs can also play video back on a monitor, or, via video-out connectors on video cards, on TVs. In addition, PC soundcards are available that decode and play Dolby Digital surround sound. ---- If you want to play videos on a standalone dvd player attached to a television, you will want to determine if the player can accept cd-r and/or cd-rw, and which, if any, video CD format it can play. Video CDs (VCDs) can be created in a wide variety of formats, with Super Video CD (SVCD) being the most widely encoded by people on this forum. You can check out the capabilities of the various Video CD formats, and the capabilities of your dvd player, at -- they have a database of dvd players, listing the supported media and formats they support, as well as details of VCD, SVCD, XSVCD, and other formats. The most popular SVCD/VCD encoding suite here seems to be DVD2SVCD. ---- If you want to create videos for playback on a PC, you will probably want to start by creating audio - video interleaving (.avi) files. These can support a wide variety of video and audio formats. There are other methodologies for managing video and audio, but .avi seems to be the most universal. The most popular video encoding format is probably DivX. The last time I checked at they'd had more than 60 million people download the codec. And that was some time ago. The most popular DivX encoding suite here seems to be Gordian Knot. It can be a little bit imposing for the newcomer, but has great flexibility and offers a base from which a lot of customized encoding can be done. Anyone who has used it would recommend that newcomers follow Doom9's guide step-by-step for their first few encodings.

jggimi: That was a really clean, concise description of available options. At my current level of comprehension, I can barely point a fellow newbie in what I think is the right direction. After reading your post, I have added more research topics to my list. Thanks a lot for the help, and don't give up on us! ammck55

Thanks! Trust me, we've all been new, and we've all gone through a learning curve. What knowledge I have came from 1) reading, 2) getting confused, 3) asking questions, 4) experimenting, 5) making mistakes, 6) repeat from step 2, and occasionally repeating from step 1. The answer was concise because I have to keep things simple, myself, or I end up at step 2 again and again.