I travel a fair amount....I've gotten a decent laptop (and to be honest macosX has proved to be the best in terms of power management but thats neither here nor there) and I decided that The Sopranos Season 1 is what I want to travel with next.. I auto-transcode all my SD Mythtv recordings to mpeg4 and I am quite happy with the results even on my 119" 1080P display. I want to take my DVDs of [at this time] season 1 and transcode them, theoretically with x264, to watch on a plane. I just tried k9copy and had the prerequisites for x264 but after letting it churn for a few hours....no output. NO FILES can be found. I'm not trying to rag on this particular software but I am looking for something where I put in a disk and get out transcoded material with minimal work. I totally have done the whole mencoder and ffmpeg (and handbrake and dvdshrink via wine etc etc) route but I want a simple gui to 'just deal with it'. Suggestions?

-Trouble

DVD Fab HD Decrypter will do it, and it is officially supported under Wine. Just put a DVD in the drive, a couple of clicks, and you'll have h264 files.

http://www.dvdfab.com/download.htm

It's good to support companies that recognize/support Linux, even if under Wine.

You'd want the Platinum version.

It has a 30 day full function trial period, so you should be able to do all the DVD you want for your trip in the 30 day free period.

These guys are basically the only ones enabling full DVD and BluRay processing for Linux.

For terminal programs like mencoder, you can put all of the commands in a script. The script is made executable, and can then be run with just one command.

Re:k9 copy, I've had similar experiences. Honestly as far as I can tell, it's a gui with buttons that don't do anything except make your drive spin. It's just plain failed to work in any sense everytime I've tried using it.

in regards to k9copy, have you installed all the needed libs and codecs? i haven't run into any problems with k9copy. another option would be dvdfab/decrypter/shrink/etc in wine.

Ok after playing with k9copy a bit more, I've gotten it to work. It doesn't like an mp4 container so I'm thinking I'm just missing something there. It is doing what I need it to do via mencoder in the back end and working well. Happy to see it using all four cores :)
Thanks for the input.
-Trouble

After a fair bit of testing, I've found that I really am liking OGMRip! Easy to use and more flexible options for the encoder itself and it outputs into pretty little matroska containers. Give it a shot...seems quite good.
-Trouble