Your favorite DVD-to-AVI tool?

[shira]

I've been using DVDx for about 2-3 years, and I'm frustrated that version 2.10 (which I downloaded tonight) seems to have all the same bugs that were in version 2.3, which is what I was using before.

So... I think I'm ready to replace DVDx with a better DVD-to-AVI conversion tool. What does everyone recommend?

Characteristics I'm looking for:

* Needs to be Vista-friendly. (Oh, how I HATE Vista!)
* Need something that isn't too buggy. I'm so frustrated with DVDx's bugs.
* Need decent performance.
* Need reasonably good compression on the AVI files. (I realize there's a tradeoff with performance on this!)

I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for a good product - it doesn't have to be freeware.

[Baldrick]

AutoGK or AVI.net if you want AVI DivX/Xvid.

[guns1inger]

I second AutoGK

[Bradskey]

You should try pgc.NET and avi.NET from www.clonead.co.uk. Read the simple guides at that site. These are WAY better "get-it-done" type tools for DVD to DivX/Xvid than DVDx. These are clean slick frontends for standard tools like avisynth, vobsub and vstrip. The only required support tools are avisynth and vobsub, which the author includes in a support package. Performance is only dependent on the codecs and your hardware. Compression and 1-pass/2-pass mode are configurable. You can choose whether to recompress audio. You can do batch jobs. Async problems only occur if there are errors in the original MPEG2 steam, in which case you'll need another tool to fix those, but the majority of the time there is no problem. These programs are donate-ware. You can use it for free, and there are links to donate to the author if you find it useful -- I did.