Matt, as you may have seen youself by now, WinX lets you select which video track to rip from those available on the DVD, and it lets you choose among various types of further compression. There are some nice options but I have not explored them much, however I suspect it is not as flexible as DVDShrink, which I've heard so much about years ago but never tried.

The reason I did not dig much in the options available is that, because of my compulsive need to collect stuff, I simply hate the idea of leaving anything behind from my DVDs and so my goal was to create a complete copy of the DVD on HDD. You never know, you may need Japanese subtitles some day.

For your same reason (disk space) I never ripped my DVD collection and I am not sure I want to do so yet. I just had some DVDs from friends that I wanted to have, and decided to put those only on HDD, and with the occasion to start looking for proper tools and design my procedure to one day rip all my collection. I suspect that day is not far, but maybe not just yet.

Incidentally, my home server is running out of space. I just ordered two 4TB HDDs which I will use to replace my current 3TB mirror. That is of course not going to be enough for my entire DVD/BR collection, so...

I do have a Drobo, but I only use it for local backup.

Like all of you guys I remember the days when a CD or a 100MB Iomega Zip seemed huge, and today Sandisk presented a 200GB microSD card. Yet, storage space never seems to be enough.
Why don't we have 10TB HDD already?!