I've been using #1 DVD Ripper
http://www.dvdtox.com/dvd_ripper.htm and it works great. You can select all the files you want to rip off of the DVD and it will compile them into one file.
Then I use VirtualDub to compress the file to a desired size. I use DivX for my compression rate.
It took me awhile before I was able to rip and compress my DVDs with ease. Although I had alot of help from bigds63. If you haven't already, check out his tutorials
http://www.bigdsvideo.com.