Slowdays

Does anyone know a single program that can rip a dvd, preferably episodes, and encode it with xvid ? I hate to use 100 programs to do this...

Trying Handbrake atm, ill see if it does the shit properly

Very interesting! I just tried encoding an existing rip of the movie Orlando with Staxrip - it's really quite nice in that it has an extensive help system - one that actually downloads necessary utilities and codecs for you.

The interface seems intuitive enough, if a bit long-winded even after you have it set up. Having an existing rip, however, is a prerequisite, but again there are many tools suited for that step... but I understand you would enjoy a program that does everything from ripping to encoding?

Some observations regarding my DVD-rip done with Staxrip: It took something like 8 hours, I forgot about subtitles, the audio was out of sync and I forgot to remove the DVD menus from the rip. Picture quality was crisp as hell with x264 but extremely laggy and I was unable to watch it with WMP.

Not exactly what I asked for

I'll just say that Handbreak is a nice and simple tool that most likely has super much under the hood if you care to look. I try to use presets with a few tweaks (encoder and so on) and it works good. Pretty fast too i think

Speed is a key issue for anyone who does a lot of ripping/encoding, and even if you're not going to do that much in practice I still think speed should be something to aspire to program-wise. I'll have to have a look at the program asap

For subtitle-related functionality (converting from one format to another, for instance, or fixing a timing issue), Subtitle Workshop is the best I've used.