The most part of a DVD is being used for compressed streams of Video. Compared to the VideoCD the DVD has a lot higher resolution and higher picture quality. But this better quality comes with a price. And this price is called : bitrate.

So to get the contents of a DVD onto normal CDs we have to achieve it that the high bitrate video-streams gets a lot smaller than it was on the DVD. First DVD conversions were done by converting the DVD to VideoCD or SuperVideoCD (slightly higher resolution than VCD) but these formats in no way came close to the quality of DVD.

But Microsoft helped out. They already release an MPEG4 Compressor some years ago but no one used it. MPEG4 was originally designed for low-bitrate applications and for usage with low resolution images (for example in cell-phone or for IP-telephony). But it is also extremely brilliant when using it with high resolution imagery, like, say.. a DVD.

Right now XViD is the best compression to be used for converting DVDs. Here I'm presenting three conversion methods. (you may also use the links on the left)

[XMPEG 4.5 ]
High Quality but slow (avg. 11 fps @ Athlon 500)

[MPEG2AVI]
High Quality but fast (avg. 12 fps @ Athlon 500)

[DirectShow]
Experimental