Like a lot of people, I have a lot of DVDs. But we also have a stupid amount of disk space and a media centre (Boxee) so the DVDs are getting less and less use. It would be nice to convert our DVDs into something more relevant to our needs.

I've dabbled with DVD ripping before but whereas I'd usually transcode down to a smaller picture size with a better video compression algorithm, this takes a silly amount of time. I don't have a couple of hours available for each disk. (Sidebar: is there dedicated, Linux-friendly hardware to improve h264 encoding performance?)

So I was wondering if there's anything that take the DVD filesystem, De-CSS it, and then stitch together any the VOBs that make up the main part of the film and package that up in a wrapping format like MKV. A bonus would be if it could grab the subtitles and stick them in too but that's not a requirement as Boxee can grab the subtitles online if it needs to.