My progress has done a 180 and I seem to be heading further away from the goal of easy rip/encoding. The central problem, it seems to me, is that all the guides out there are telling you how to work with everything BUT interlaced NTSC video.
I've looked carefully at both guides up on PocketMatrix, the IVTC guide at doom9.net, DIVX Digest's DVD to DIVX conversion guide, and I just seem to be getting more and more confused.
I want to use DVDs that are in NTSC 720X480 Interlaced format. I want to convert them to 320x240 non-interlaced DIVX 5. The de-interlacing and IVTC processes seem entirely too complicated. So I'm stuck.
I think I have all the software I need(and then some).
Someone please help!