a mate of mine at the office is leaving for a year to travel with his wife before they settle down and have kids. He's bought a mini laptop (bigger than an eepc but smaller than my 12" mac) and wants to use it to watch his dvds on when on buses in bangkok or whatever.

I tend to leave mine uncompressed but he's only got 80Gb to play with so wants to avi them up to maximise hdd space. Does anyone have a clue how to do this on xp? I'm way behind the times on this?

handbrake is awesome, but the
win32 port won't decyrpt the dvd

iriverter.

awesome little program. find it on sourceforge.

I usually use the DVDDecrypter + Handbrake combo, but if he's doing a lot of movies, could get slightly tedious.

iriverter is also a one click process once hes set up the resolution he wants and stuff. it remembers all your settings from the previous session, so all you have to do is select the vid you want to convert and click convert.

only downside is java.

Well thanks for the replies so far lads - I reckon I'll have him take a look at iriverter tomorrow.

i like handbrake for it's freeness without having to dig my eyepatch out of my sock drawer i just need to see if i can figure out how to set it up to encode a 480x272 video that works on the psp... my first attempt was a fat sack of unsupported fail