Anyone out there know a good program for ripping/compressing DVDs (full quality) to a hard drive?

I just got a 75 gb drive and would like to keep a few of my favorite movies on the hard drive to keep from loading the discs.

I tried just copying over the whole 4 gb DVD to the hard drive, then pointing WinDVD to that folder, but it played only sound and very limited choppy video.

[Running an AMD Athlon 650mhz, 256 mb, 16mb Nvidia, SB128, 17" monitor at 1024x768