I am currently backing up (ripping) my dvd collection onto my server harddrive, to allow streaming throughout my house. I am using Acidrip to do the ripping. My problem is that the quality video of the rip is not as good as I would like, and the file size is a little too big. I downloaded an .avi rip of the blu-ray movie "black hawk down" the other day, and the quality was very good. I believe it was a 720p rip. But the file size was only 700mb. When I rip regular dvd's I choose a high bitrate (around.22) but my file sizes are anywhere from 1000mb to 1200mb, and the quality is nowhere near as good. How can i use acid rip to rip a high quality video at a 700mb file size? Is there better software, or is there something I'm missing in Acidrip?
SnapOverflow
Check out this page. It's a poll of various different Linux DVD rippers - the most popular being Handbrake, followed by dvd::rip, and then some others.
I used acidrip. I find it much simpler then dvd::rip or handbrake.
I've found handbrake to be a lot easier to use, and it has more/better presets that you can use. You can try using its "target size" setting to control the output size but potentially lose some quality. It's very likely that the existing rip you found had done this, and your version should be higher quality.
https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/AvgBitrateAndTargetSize
DVD::RIP is great - you can select a DVD image directory, and it copies into your harddisk before ripping. I think it's useful when you get DVD and want to rip it.