Many people like myself jumped aboard the revolution that was the DVD ten years ago (has it already been that long??) and collected a vast library of discs that now take up space on several shelves in the corner of your lounge room. In this day and age of the PVR and DVR, even I myself find it frustrating to go to the shelf, find the movie I want to watch, take the disc out, make sure it’s free of fingerprints, stick it in the drive, skip all the blasted “mandatory” ads and trailers before you can actually get to the movie itself. At least with YouTube and downloaded AVI and MPEG files, you can simply double-click and watch what you want, when you want, on demand, 24/7 – no mess, no fuss.

So here I present a guide on how to rip your DVD collection into convenient, tidy x264-encoded MKV files. You may find that you can store your entire collection of DVD’s onto a single external hard-drive to carry with you, and will certainly serve as a useful backup the day that some inconsiderate soul scratches or steals your DVD’s! This HowTo is based on The Smorgasbord HowTo, but with modifications to bring it up to date with current implementations of x264 and MEncoder.

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