Thanks man! I use Mac the Ripper to decrypt my DVDs. I imagine if you have a quad core CPU it would haul ass! Let me know if this guess it depends on your processor, I have a Core2Duo 3.0Ghz and with a 2 hour movie doing 2-pass encoding it takes about an hour and a half to convert the movie. If you are trying to rip it straight from the DVD it might have problems since some of the copy protections give it problems, but if you use DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD to a VIDEO_TS folder on the hard drive first and convert it based on that folder. Also when you name the output file, be sure to do the file extension pull down box and change it from MP4 to AVI. On the Video tab I select 2-pass encoding and set the bitrate to 2500kbps. Sure, the only setting I change are the video format I switch to Xvid, the audio I set to AC-3, I set it to 'no cropping'. MPG file, and some movies played great like that and then some of them glitched beyond belief, so that I why I started using Handbrake, it seems to have solved all my problems so far! VOB files, by renaming them and then merging them into one big. If I used Handbrake would it allow me to govern the finished AVI file size and also retain subtitles? CloneDVD mobile does a good job of converting DVD to DivX and, after selecting a subtitle stream, will embed the subtitles into the finished image. mpeg which, if compressed minimally to 4GB, play at DVD quality, but some movies have given problems that way.

vob files from an external drive if renamed to. That would probably be OK for small TV's, but I project my PS3 image onto a 7ft screen which shows up a lot of artifacts when heavy compression is used. I have used other apps in the past, but they have all limited the final AVI size to around 2GB.

I'm interested in converting DVD to AVI whilst retaining the 5.1 soundtracks.

Handbrake convert xvid to mp4