As a newbie in ripping/encoding dvd's, my experience was a lot of trial by error. I began using Sefy's SxVCD template (which works great), and didn't know to much about bitrate calculations, etc.

To make a long story short, my greatest success at creating excellent quality dvd rips are with these particular settings. Considered VCD 2.0

I rip using smart ripper, extract wav using DVD2AVI just as the help files on this werbsite tell you to do. Then comes the use of TMPGEnc to encode. The template settings I use are as follows:
2pass variable bitrate (VBR)
Average bitrate 1500
MPEG-1 352x240 23.976fps VBR 1500kbps, Layer-2 44100Hz 224kbps


The Average bitrate could vary, depending on the amount of minues that the movie is. 1500kbps could perfectly encode a movie of 125 minutes, and probably 135 minutes but that could be pushing it. Use the bitrate calculator to determine the average bitrate (the bitrate calculator is on the tools section of this website) use the java calculator and the settings for "xvcd" seem to be very similar to what I'm working with in my template.

I encode half the movie first while using TMPGEnc. I was scared because after it was complete, the file was 775MB. I thought it wouldn't fit on a standard 700mb cd-r. Well it did. Use the nero 5.5 program to burn the vcd.

My latest rip was a dvd entitled "U-Turn" and it turned out practically just like the dvd it self, I was very pleased.