[Peer van Heuen]

Originally Posted by click2

Thanks for your reply, but I'm not really interested in backing these up; as i happen to own the original DVD, this is just for my personal interest.

Doesn't the term "backup" imply exactly that: that you own the originals?
Or did the "secondary" meaning of "backing up" get promoted from being just a euphemism for piracy?

...sorry, I couldn't resist that little side note

Originally Posted by click2

Thanks for your reply, but I'm not really interested in backing these up; as i happen to own the original DVD, this is just for my personal interest. Thus the price of media is irrelevant, and 700MB is an arbitrary limit that i happen to be quite fond of.

Is it possible to allocate my 700MB fairly over all the differently-sized videos, without encoding black bars?

...but as an answer: what would you actually expect the videos to look like, if not adding black bars?
You have some options, like resizing and cropping, but whatever you do - if the result is supposed to be one video, you'll have to decide for an aspect ratio.