My goal is to just have enough HD space so I don't have to waste the time to transcode. It's what takes the longest amount of time and generally has the propensity to produce the incompatibilities and sync issues one might see. Just straight DVD rip (optionally leaving out some extras) and saved as a disk image (ISO). This solution is less portable, but you can always transcode from it later. Akin to keeping FLAC music and making portable MP3s as needed at a later date.
Agreed. I've been busy on and off also doing this with all my DVD's. This project had been 'halted' for now since I need to buy some additional HD's (I've run out of disk space). I've also opted to simply rip the DVD's straight to ISO, only leaving out the languages/subtitles and/or commercials I don't need or want. The file is then saved as an mpeg-2 stream and takes about 4-5 GB per movie (of course longer movies use up more disk space). That way I can indeed always transcode from it later.
Another benefit is that it only takes me 7 minutes per movie to rip. If I wanted to do on-the-fly transcoding as well, I'm sure it would take about one hour per film. Not really do-able for a 1000+ movie collection. So that's why I opted to keep the orginal format; storage space is cheap enough these days anyway. Finally, another plus is these types of files can be played with literally every player and everything is contained in one big ISO file and not in the usual DVD type file setup with the audio-ts and video_ts subdirectories.
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