I have just been using AcidRip to convert DVD’s into AVI files so that I can I copies of family movies in a more compressed format.. it will either use a DVD disk or a DVD image on a harddrive to convert to the required format that you want.
It uses mencoder which is part of the mplayer suit of applications, mplayer is also a very nice movie player too, which I use mainly from the command line, but there is also a GUI for it.
mplayer -fs <filename> |
would play a video in full screen (-fs) and since I do have a console window open most of the time then it is sometimes just easier to use the console to play a video.