I have been ripping my worn Dune (CoD is next) DVD's to Divx using this helpful guide, to clarify to anyone from the MPAA i'm not doing this to send it over the internet but because my disk is worn and skips when played.
I was originally going to use AC3 audio, however at first QuickTime refused to play AC3 however VLC played it nicely. I have since found an AC3 Plugin for QuickTime Unfortunatly I deleted the temporary files that had AC3 audio so i can't test that codec right now.
When i tried to encode the first disk of dune ( i have the 3-disc directors cut ) It was so badly scratched that it took over 2 days do the first pass. After 2 days of sitting in my DVD drive the disk was NOT going to do a 2nd pass. I'm actually doing 3-pass encoding with the 2nd disk right now. The advantage of 3-pass encoding is that you only encode the audio once (on the first pass), then encode video on the 2nd & 3rd pass. This makes the overall encode faster since you only encode the audio once.
the command to do this encoding is very simple, all those months i had NetFlix and I fought with dozens of softwares to rip dvd's i never realized that mencoder could do it so easyily.
mencoder dvd://2 -ovc frameno -o frameno.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3
mencoder dvd://2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1 -oac copy -o movie.avi
mencoder dvd://2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2 -oac copy -o movie.avi
While encoding i get a message "1 duplicate frame(s)!" every other frame or so… but the output quality is fabulous, the first "night" of Dune is virtually indestinguihable from the full-frame DVD except when seeking which is probably more a function of the fact that it's running over NFS than the encoded file itself.
My new EdiMax 32-port 10/100mbit autosensing auto MDI/MDI-X switch (ES-312RL) is great. The all-metal enclosure and 19-inch rackmount form make it a solid piece of equipment.
WordPress is great, though it lacks any decent support for multiple weblogs and i've yet to find a Mac OS X native posting app… still looking though.