Media Player 11 for me, just set to mp3 192-320 or whatever you like.

DVD's I use ripbot x264... allows batching of VOBs into avc avi or mkv etc. Slightly more compression but better quality than your standard xvid etc...

Although, if you have the HD capacity, then just extract the VOBs and watch as is, you'll get the bestest quality... however at ~8gb each dvd, you'll quickly fill even the largest HD's out there...