Dummy - how to capture and encode DVD to AVI for laptop?

[wiszniak]

I am new to VLC. Playing files and DVD works fine but am having trouble trying to understand best way to capture and encode to smaller resolution and smaller files (350-500MB/hr)
Can this include keeping menu's?
I want to load my DVD's onto laptop for use when travelling etc...
Tks

[DJ]

H.264 for video, MP4a for Audio in a MP4 container will give some nice results. Lots better than AVI.

If you want WMP compatibility and don't want to install VLC on your Laptop or your Laptop is to slow. Try DivX 3 and MP3 in a ASF container. This will show up as MPEG43 in WMP. Either way you wont get menus and will need to use dvdsimple://

[wiszniak]

Thanks DJ
I intend to always run VLC full version on laptop, on PC&XP at the moment (updating to MAC in future). Therefore I presume DVDMenus could be a tool to use as well?
Can I have just an output file for the movie part, eg select dynamically the part of DVD I want to capture & compact.

[DJ]

You presume incorrectly! It it's doubtful that menus will ever be made part of the transcode anytime soon in any version of VLC.