i am currently putting my entire dvd collection on 3 300g hardrives in pullout trays..i have a mixture of xvids and dvds' totaling about 900 movies and about 150 of those are DVDs. i was looking at rat to get all the dvds on the drives but after trying a few rats i gave up on the idea....the problem is space of course but having the menus isnt worth the quality cut...an 800mb xvid made in autogk looks waaaaaaaay better and theres not that little issue of it taking about the same amount of time to unrat a dvd as is does to convert an xvid to dvd...so my final solution is to backup about 30 of my favorite dvds fully on the hd so i can watchem in power dvd on the tv...and the rest are going to xvid via autogk....thats what was needed an auto gk that does what rat's doing encoding menus and all and a pluggin for media player to watch it....a 700 mb xvid converted to a dvd looks better than a rat dvd...so im slithering back under my rock cya.
If you don't want to back up the whole DVD but only one of the titles of the DVD, xvid makes certainly sense (if you are sure you never want to go back to DVD). Personally I want to have the full DVD and I have backed up my collection to ratDVD (more than 300 titles) and I am very happy with the quality (used default settings). I also tried xvid and I am pretty sure that when you compare it at the same bitrate xvid is not better. Besides, to compare quality without giving details about settings, bitrate, included video, audio, etc. doesn't make much sense to me...
