You'll find aplenty of good tools for DVD ripping
here although I believe there's no remedy yet for the very latest DVD protection scheme.
Checkout
transcode video encoder as well, it's commandline but some popular programs (like K3B) can be used as frontends for it.
PS: I can see now PCLInuxOS liveCD updated to .81a, in three different favours: One generic, one for ATI video cards and one for Nvidia ones. The reason is almost obvious if you have toyed with .81: I could not start the xserver at all, even after passing nonsense at the kernel init and then gfalling to console and editing xorg.conf on it... (.8-nv worked fine). This problem doesn't happen with ALL nvidia or ATI videocards, but it can be a stopper, especially for newbies.
I have not tried the new liveCD-yet... .81 installed fine on my laptop (Intel 855 graphic card), but on my home puter (Nvidia 5200) I could not start X.
Of course this is only toying, my fav distro is not Mandy anymore... but Arch Linux is rather too difficult for n00bs (maybe they can afford trying it after 7-8 months experience with Mandys, Suses and the like).