I just looked at the mencoder man page---6,000 lines. yikes.

I used dvdbackup to back up my DVDs onto the hard drive, and I would
now like to convert this into something that is a little smaller in
size than 4-8GB each, without sacrificing much quality. I am ok if it
still takes 1-2GB. could someone please give me an example of how to
get this into a better format (presumably something like xvid, using
something like mencoder). help appreciated.

sincerely,

/iaw