Yes you are all right, vcdhelp, digital digest, doom9, etc are all great sites. I visit and lean from as well. They all have their strengths and weaknesses.
It was actually a tutorial posted at cdrfreaks eary in 2000 that got me started. Back then using DVD2MPEG Squeezer v1.0 with Panasonic encoder 2.1. and early bug riden versions of FlaskMPEG. The software has come a long way since then, thank goodness.