DVD::RIP

My daughters are really bored with their range of DVDs so if ripping DVDs was legal I might sign up to Amazon's DVD rental for a free 2 week trial and copy some Angelina Ballerinas to my hard disk using the wonderful DVD::RIP.
DVD::RIP is a perl/tcl graphical front end to the various command line tools needed to rip, re size and transcode DVDs. It offers a lot of flexibility but is still the easiest to use of any i've tried. I think this is because it's not dumbed down. The defaults are sensible and you can pretty much click and go but the UI is very well laid out so it's easy to find the setting you need to change.
It does require a high level understanding of the process:

1. Extract the raw MPEG2 from the DVD.
2. Resize/Crop if desired
3. Transcode to MPEG4

It would be usable if you didn't understand the process, which is a shame, but once you get past that - it is very straightforward.