One thing that should be mentioned, MacTheRipper Rips the Full DVD to the Hard Drive FULL SIZED so on a Dual Layer DVD 8.6 or around GB! Handbrake rips it as an MP4 or AVI and it takes way less room. Good for storing movies on the HDD.
Exactly what I do*. I have a three year old daughter who uses DVDs for skates. Having trashed at least 50 of them, now any new one I buy gets ripped to the hard disk, and a destroyable copy made.
Toast titanium seems very drama free. You can compress the whole thing onto a 4.7gb dvd, or if you're not bothered about extras etc, often you can get the main movie onto a single 4.7gb disk without compressing at all. It's much faster if you don't have to compress it first as well.
I'm not sure about dual layers - I suspect mine will do them, but I have never tried it.
*edit - er, rereading it, that's exactly what I don't do. I store the whole DVD using MTR. I use handbrake to make mp4s for the Ipod.