One of the most versitle, free tools available on OSX for encoding DVDs into video files is Handbrake, an open-source and free software package.  It is an extraordinarily handy piece of software and is easy to use, to boot.

After downloading and installing via the traditional means, you are presented with a dialog box asking you to point Handbrake towards its input.  This can be either a DVD in your drive, an image file of a DVD, or a Video_TS directory of a pre-ripped DVD sitting on your hard drive.  Once selected, the program will analyze the data to figure out movie length and sound options, then pop up with the main encoding window.  While seemingly complex at first, this window is the key to your future encoding successes and has a handy set of Presets that are available under a button at the top right of the screen.  These Presets can take away a lot of the pain of figuring out what the various controls do by balancing quality and size, via preselected options designed to fit your targeted viewing device.

We here at My Media Delivered have had pretty good success in mating Xbox 360s with Macs (via 360 Connect), so if that is your device set as well, please by all means shoot for the Xbox 360 Preset.  This gives you decent video quality at about 650 megabytes per hour of content.  Other Presets will give varying degrees of quality at big and smaller filesizes (for instance, the iPod Preset will give you drastically smaller filesizes but at reduced quality level… however, don’t worry, on an iPod screen, videos encoded with this preset look great due to their small size, hence, diminishing the flaws).

Handbrake can encode MPEG4 videos (using FFMPEG or Xvid encoding) and H.264 video.  It can also passthrough Dolby Digital (AC3) soundtracks or downconvert to stereo.  Don’t worry if you don’t know what these terms mean… the presets will take good care of you. Anyone willing to tinker with the settings will find they can enhance the quality of their DVD rips by enabling 2 pass encoding, or by increasing the bit rate (the rate of compression).

Currently Handbrake is the best way to get your DVD media turned into those 1′s and 0′s that your hard drive reads. Give it a shot.

Handbrake supports the following devices with presets:

• Apple TV
• iPhone/iPod Touch
• iPod
• PlayStation 3
• PSP
• Xbox 360