Ripping neccessary for DVD to XviD conversion?

[headless chicken]

I have what I thought was a commercial DVD, but it turns out it is some funky DVD+RW according to DVD Decryptor. I've never ripped a full DVD before, but this is one of my alltime favorites from childhood.

Anyway, the DVD has been authored a bit weird, with two chapter 1s and so the program I would have used to convert it to XviD on the Mac is having difficulty reading both chapters that need converting. Thus, I thought I'd need to do the conversion on a PC. However, my PC laptop will not create or handle single files over 4GB. Luckily, the individual VOBs etc are all under that limit, but I was unable to run DVD Decryptor successfully. So my question is, since the DVD is not encrypted, do I need to rip the DVD to the HD first, or could I use AutoGK or a similar program by just pointing to the DVD as the input?

[manono]

Hi-

If it's unencrypted, you can just drag and drop the files to the hard drive. You don't need DVD Decrypter at all. However, if DVD Decrypter couldn't do the job, perhaps there's something wrong with the DVD, scratched or dirty or something. As for AutoGK reading directly off of the DVD-ROM, I don't know for sure. You could try it, but keeping your DVD-ROM running for the whole encoding session is said not to be very good for the drive.