There's a couple of relatively new apps that I think deserve a mention here, OGMRip and the Vamps tools.
OGMRip is, essentially, a rather basic DVD to AVI convertor, though it does have a couple of nice features:
- Store movie in either AVI/OGM/MKV container
- Record audio in MP3/Ogg/Wave/AC3 format
- Record video in XviD/libavcodec's MPEG-4 format (X264 and Theora coming).
You can also choose the resize filter to use, and encode subtitles (it scans them with OCR and auto-spell-checks them, if you want).
It's still quite new though, as I mentioned, but I'm finding it a very sleek solution to DVD ripping on Linux. (Just for info, it uses mplayer/mencoder behind the scenes for the actual conversion, but works out all the settings for you.)
The second is
The Vamps Tools, which is an attempt at a DVD Shrink clone for Linux. I haven't actually used it myself yet, so don't know what works and what doesn't, but looking at it there's definite promise there.
Hopefully some of you will find these apps useful.