I've been doing this lately, I use dvdbackup to rip them to an NFS mounted working directory and from there use mencoder to do a 2 pass encode to MPEG4. Then rip subtitles with transcode tools & OCR them with gocr.
One thing to watch out for is how your DVD drive handles dual layer disks. I was ripping with an older NEC at first, then noticed some movies skipping during the layer transistion.
Some of my bookmarks:
http://www.bunkus.org/dvdripping4lin...gle/index.html
http://axljab.homelinux.org/Mencoder_DVD_to_DivX
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-si...feat-dvd-mpeg4