Physical discs are a nuisance, I really just want to play what I want to watch in the room I want to watch it just streaming it over the wireless. This actually works wonderfully well. Unfortunately just copying the file structure of a DVD works and gives you DVD-quality video, but the size is huge and streaming this over the wireless tends to create some trouble (not to mention that every byte must also be encrypted/decrypted for ssh so this is getting CPU intensive too, ssh offloading onto hardware would be so cool). Hence the need to "rip" the DVD and encode it to some smaller format arises.

After spending a while looking at various options I finally found the great thoggen.

Only problem left is how much to compress. After some very un-scientific tests (Google failed to find me any nice studies/graphs!) I decided on a quality of 35 and no resizing. But if anyone knows of a better study on what settings to prefer it would be greatly appreciated! It would be great to see quality vs file size vs frame size for different types of video. Ideally with a subjective "human quality" level too so you'd know what still looks good.