There appears to be a lot of free one stop shop for tools to convert a movie DVD into an MPEG4 file.
The way I did the conversion was the following:
- Install Xvid which comes with encoder. (Or DivX Pro, which is not free.)
- Install Fhg Radium MP3 codec for encoding the audio stream into 128bps, 44khz mp3 stereo stream.
- Smartripper – for ripping the DVD to hard drive in raw format.
- Xmpeg – for converting raw format into DivX using the Xvid video encoder and Radium mp3 audio encoder.
You may want to check out the other tools… might be simpler than the method which I used.