Every Flavour Beans

Both the software are extremely easy to use.

#1 DVD Ripper can actually create compressed AVI files directly from a DVD, no separate software for ripping is needed(step 1), but I prefer to first rip the DVD to the hard disk(which is a fast process) and then convert the ripped VOB files to the AVI format(which takes a lot of time). #1 DVD Ripper is a paid software, so go through the product details on its website and make up your mind if it’s worth buying or not. AutoGK is a free application and boasts of a bigger feature set too. Where as #1 DVD Ripper loads all the available chapters from the DVD upon opening the disk or the folder containing the VOB files, we have to manually add all the IFO files one after the other in AutoGK(add IFO files instead of VOB files if you want to convert including the subtitles; subtitles can be selected from a drop-down box in #1 DVD Ripper). AutoGK allows different output file sizes to be selected. Both the software have an option to shutdown the system when all the jobs are completed(multiple jobs can be queued before starting the conversion process).

Lot of advanced editing and conversion operations are supported by two extremely popular Free software applications:

FlaskMPEG and VirtualDub have different feature sets, but together they can handle most of the video manipulation tasks. They are not the easiest to use applications though.

I will list my preferred applications for converting to other formats in another post.

The final piece in the puzzle is the free application Videora iPod Converter which converts an AVI(DivX/XviD) file to MPEG-4 format, which can then be played on the iPod player(use iTunes to copy the file).

If you have downloaded an AVI file(or some other format) from the Internet, they too can be converted to MPEG-4 using Videora iPod Converter software. But if you want to add the subtitles to the AVI file, you have to merge them first. I use AviRecomp to merge the subtitles with the downloaded AVI files.