DVDs are all MPEG2. Unprotected ones can be played with any MPEG2 codec and reencoded to a lower bit-rate and also transcoded to a different format. Protected ones (Holywoood stuff with CSS) must first be unencrypted before being played or otherwise manipulated.

Some people just rip and that's it. Then you'll need a player that can both play back a file as well as encrypted streams. Others unencrypt but don't rencode/transcode. Some do it all to save space. With the various tools you can take out whole menus, some menus, replace menus, remove individual audio tracks, subtitles, etc. You can pretty much customize the whole thing. You can even squish (reencode at a lower bitrate) two movies and put them back on a single DVD with a custom menu (good to do with content you want to give to a kid so they don't trash the original discs and don't have to swap out discs to access multiple programs).

Back on topic for a second, I bought a Seagate 200GB ATA-133 drive last night and an aluminum external enclosure with Firewire (IEEE1394) and USB2.0 interface. This is going to come in very handy as both my desktop systems are Shuttles with no more space inside them for drives and I also use an Apple PowerBook. Formatted the disk in the Mac HFS+ Journaled format and use driver software on the Windows machines to read/write to it (can't write to NTFS from Mac OS). I'm also going to get a Kurobox to use with another drive (200-300GB) in a couple of months.

Bruno