I wish to compress my DVDs onto my harddisk for viewing purposes, however there seem to be many compressed video formats avaliable, divx, xvid, mp4 so on and so forth. Which would you all recommend? Hopefully it is one which is easy to encode into along with subtitles and all.
XviD is just a video codec though. A raw XviD stream won't do you much good. You also need to pick a container and audio format or rather I would pick the audio first, since that has an impact on container choice. If you want to keep AC3/DTS, then mp4 is out. If you want AAC audio, then mp4 or mkv would be fine. For mp3 AVI, mkv and mp4 are all possible. For VBR mp3 mkv will have the lowest overhead...
For a quasi-standard (there is no official standard) XviDAVI with mp3 or AC3/DTS audio. Try AutoGK, FairUse Wizard, StaxRip, AVI.NET, etc. Such apps are generally aimed for SAP compatibility though, which doesn't matter if you are only going for HDD playback.
