Ripping MY DVD Collection

the plain old Imgburn is a good one to just rip an ISO image and use daemon tool to mount the ISO so PowerDVD and such could play them from the HDD. and I have the daemon tool already setup in Meedio to play any of my DVD ISO from the HTPC already. so, it isn't too hard for me to migrate to BR/HDDVD ISO.

I rip the movie uncompressed to .iso using DVDShrink, then I use AutoGK to convert the file into an xvid .avi

I usually convert to about 2gb so I can keep quality and the 5.1 audio, but will adjust size higher or lower depending on the actual length of the movie.

AFAIK compressing with DVD Shrink before converting to AVI is both pointless and detrimental to quality. It's better just to rip the DVD (if using an app that doesn't rip) and then get the AVI conversion app to convert to the size you want.

The simplest but good apps I've seen to do this are Handbrake, FairUse Wizard (rips as well as converts) and SimpleDivx. For ripping DVD Decrypter is good.