Well, just from my experience, I would suggest two programs, both of which are free.
For ripping footage from DVD's, I would suggest AOA DVD Ripper:
http://www.aoamedia.com/dvd_ripper.htmTo use the program, you do not need to purchase it, the trial does just fine. You can rip videos by chapter or however you want, with just the oen restriction that you can only rip 10 minutes of footage at a time.
As for converting and encoding well, I would suggest EO Video:
http://www.eo-video.com/This program converts and encodes nearly any video file into an AVI, MPEG, or WAV. It can encode with pretty much any codec you have on your computer, and you get a lot of control with attributes of the output, like codec, frame size, quality, etc.