Rip DVD to H.264 - have some questions?

Hi,

I'm about to rip a bunch of DVDs. For some of these I don't bother with having perfect image quality, so I intend to transcode to H.264 with a file size of ~1 GB per DVD to save some space. I intend to use ".mkv" as container format and will embed subs. My intention is to use AnyDVD to rip the DVD to a folder, and then use Handbrake to convert the ripped video folder to a ".mkv" file using the H.264 video format.

Now I have some questions:

1. Have I chosen the right applications for the job of ripping & converting? Or are there some better applications that I should consider?

2. I would like to avoid having to manually specify exactly what to rip for each DVD. Is there any way to make the applications automatically rip/convert only the main title and chapters of the DVD? If so, how well do they succeed in that? Do they fail to detect this automatically sometimes, so that I will end up with a video file containing stuff I don't want and/or missing stuff that I want?

Thanks!

Thanks!

Regarding the option to "rip just the main movie or the entire disk", how well does it work if one selects that only the main movie shall be ripped? Is there a chance that a DVD can have been produced in such a way that the rip will contain unwanted stuff anyway (e.g. "FBI warnings"), or miss some stuff that one normally considers to be a part of the main movie?

BTW: How does the application detect what the main movie is anyway? Does it just locate the DVD title with the longest running time and rip all the chapters associated with that title?