The VideoLAN Forums

Is it possible to rip the audio commentary from a DVD, with both video and audio? I have tried this a few times and it never seems to work. Perhaps I'm just not doing things right.

You mean all audio tracks? "vlc --sout-all" should do that, but only works if the target file format support multiple tracks.

Will that create an MPEG file I can play from my hard drive as if I was watching the DVD with commentary?

If you want to dump the raw DVD with menus and everything, you really should copy the drive content as is, with your favorite file manager. There's no point in using VLC or any other multimedia transcoder.