This new DVD player from Philips is simply awesome. Get it from walmart for $69. The cool thing about this DVD player is its ability to play MPEG4 videos (Divx and Xvid formats). I have been using this baby for about a month now, and I give it a 5-star rating.

I make back-ups of DVD movies and videos by converting them to Divx. Since Divx is a compressed format, you can easily put 3 to 5 movies in a DVD+R media without loosing any noticeable video quality. There are plenty of softwares available for ripping and encoding DVDs, but my favorite is dvd::rip. It run on linux, and this makes it even more cool because DVD ripping and encoding is a very CPU entensive process, and will frequently crash Windows OS. (XP Pro is much more stable, but simply forget doing DVD ripping and encoding on previous versions of windows).

I like encoding DVD movies in Divx with a video bitrate of 1Mbps and audio bitrate of 192Kbps.

BTW you can use dvd-shrink and dvd-decrypter to make an exact copy of any DVD. It is legal, as long as you own the original DVD that you are copying. (If you care about legal crap!)