I know, I have seen all the proponents for Fairuse, But i am working on a laptop and do not have the disk space to rip that much of a DVD to my harddrive. I have use the trial version of pocket dvd wizard and I like it's simplicity.

I have beta player and the sample file of the matrix looks great.

I do not have a problem with spending 20-30 dollars on a program that will work as good as pocket dvd wizard, i would like to get the quality of the matrix on beta player.

Is that quality possible with a wma file?
what are the advantages of avi with beta player?

WMV (not wma, that audio) doesn't offer that well compression. It is used mostly for streaming video.

Divx and Xvid offer much lower files sizes and much better quality of WMV.

I WOULD NOT!!!! recommend buying a program for $30. It is just a waste of money. There are other ways that offer much better quality, that use all free programs. Here is a great beginers guide.
http://www.aximsite.com/articles/link.php?id=215
It is free and it works well. There are even some better programs (free) butter require more knowledge. For example virtualdub.

   

But isnt there some way to do this without saving the entire DVD to the hardrive?

Despite this being a bad idea for all sorts of reasons DVDx will do what you want and yes it's free.

DVDx is an ok program. I find it takes extremely long to convert a movie using DVDx.
I also find that using dvdx is more unsuccessful than using vdub.

   

If you want a program which is easy to use but still quite advanced try this www.pqdvd.com i use it because it is very fast at encoding faster than watching the movie. It stores nothing on your hardrive either