The process of creating a DivX ;-) encoded video from DVD is a
whole lot easier than it used to be. There's plenty of tutorials
online, but it boils down to this:    • Rip the DVD files from
the disk and decrypt them. This leaves a number of .VOB (Video
OBject) files on your hard drive.    • Encode the video and
audio using the DivX ;-) and Mp3 codecs respectively  The tools
currently available take care of syncing the audio and video for
the most part. The software packages I use are:  The great thing
about DivX ;-) is the small file size it generates. A typical
DVD is around six gigabytes in size. A DivX ;-) encoded version
of the same movie can be made to fit on a CDROM, which is around
650Mb. The degradation in quality is only evident in scenes when
there is a lot of 'action' on the screen.  A movie such as U-571
took around fifteen hours to encode (Pentium 3 500), however.
Creating DivX ;-) takes plenty of computing power, and so does
playing them.  Note that the smiley is part of the name of the
codec.