I used to rip my movies. The process took several steps and was not always dependable. The reason I started was that my upconverting DVD player would not upconvert "protected" DVDs. I wanted to watch my old DVD's in the higher res without re-purchasing them and . . . I "hated" being forced to watch previews, warnings and having my menu restricted on movies I legally own. I stopped buying movies a couple of years ago (no I don't pirate them) but I will relate what I learned . . . even though it might be a little dated. . . =)

I tried several rip programs and finally settled on DVDFab as the easiest and most intuitive program that worked as expected more often than the others. When I last used it there was a bug when you selected "Jump to first menu" the rip would always end up with Spanish selected by default, they may have fixed that by now. If you buy it there are several formats that you can rip to. I only used the free decrypter version so I can't comment about the other formats. Once the trial expires you can still use the program but the rip is to DVD9 which is about 8.5 GBs. More about that later. The only negative, IMHO, was the program turned on and inserted itself in to DEP exceptions. I would delete it from the list and set DEP back to the default (if I didn't, some of my games would ask for a disk to be inserted). That didn't seem to affect the program but . . . I didn't use the advanced features so . . .

Step 1 is to rip with DVDFab to a folder. Select "Remove Annoying PGC's (like FBI warnings)" but don't expect it to work every time. You will need to update DVDFab often as the DRM is changing daily. If they have fixed the "Jump to main menu" language bug you can skip step 2 (unless the warnings are not deleted).

Step 2 is to use VOBBlanker to remove the previews, warnings and menu restrictions which will also land you at the main menu if done right. This program will take some time to learn but it works great. The last version is 2.1.3.0 released in 2007. Once you learn the program it takes about ten minutes to use it. There were lots of online tuts for the program.

Step 3 is to find the original last release of DVD Shrink and download. Once the trial expires on DVDFab you will need to shrink the rip to fit on a standard DVD. DVD Shrink does this nicely. There are some fake versions out there so look for the last version 3.2.0.15 released around 2004. Point the program to your ripped, altered copy and it will reduce the size to DVD5( around 4.3 GB).

Edit: Also, DVD Shrink allow you to delete language and sound options you don't use which (my opinion only) allows for less compression to fit the 4.5 disk size since the different languages are about 450 Mbs each, sound options can be very large but I leave them intact usually.

The size is large but not so large that you can't keep four or five movies on your laptop. I would assume the other formats the purchased copy of DVDFab allows would be even smaller sizes. If you don't want / need the menus you can rip the main movie which seems to work flawlessly every time but the size will still be around 4.5 GBs.

Another thought, if your laptop HD is large you could load it up and burn back to disk after you got to your destination???

Edit: I was curious so I downloaded and installed DVDFab. They claim to rip to an amazing number of formats nowadays (see attached) Like I said, I only used the free version which supported only VOB format so I can't confirm the results of the other offered formats.

I think this is the best all-around advice, so thank you. Thanks to everyone else as well for more detailed advice.

I think I'll buy a binder.