Newbie need some help

[pfb]

Hi all,
first of all: I have very limited experience from ripping and encoding videos. Most of what I know has been collected from various pages on the net. So please, bear with me.

What I want to do is to get stuff off an DVD, encode it to xvid and put it in a avi container. I have always been using mencoder when doing this. Somebody told me that this can also be done using vlc. As I prefer vlc over mplayer, I'd gladly use vlc instead. I have done some reading on the site, and have some questions:

When using mencoder, I've always done two-pass encoding. When reading the vlc wiki about Transcoding and MPEG-4, I see nothing about two-pass encoding. Is encoding always done in one-pass with vlc?

Are there any good defaults to be used when transcoding from mpg to XviD? I've been looking, but probably in the wrong places.

Thanks in advance
/pfb