Ah. I had wondered what the tradeoff was in those terms. I figured the physical mechanics would require more battery than the graphics processing. Doesn't the machine have to do that anyway for the DVDs?

And now that I look at your post, it looks like you're talking about the process of actually ripping and encoding the movies in terms of battery power. I'm just talking about playing a divx AVI versus playing a DVD.

Regardless, I think that FairUse program does the best job, which is what the original post was about anyway

Rob, will DVDShrink really do what he's asking for? I didn't think it did any transcoding, just compression of MPEG2, and even then just the elemental streams.

*edit*
Oh, and I should mention that as far as your "fast" requirement goes, I'm sorry to say that it's unlikely. Unless you have a pretty blazing machine, you're definitely not going to get fast speeds (unless several hours is fast to you). If you're doing it on that laptop you mentioned, it's going to take quite a while. My machine has an Athlon 2100+, and I rip and compress a movie with DVDShrink in over 3 hours, and rip and encode a movie in FairUse in over 5!