I'm not terribly worried about battery life and all that. Most of the time I can plug the laptop into the car or a hotel.

However, I was hoping to find a program that would create a divx or avi file or whatever that would be a gig or less, so I could bring 20 or 30 movies with me at a time. I dont need all the extras or stuff like that in the movie, and I dont need surround sound either.

I used dvdshrink and it worked great and didnt take that long, its just not what I was looking for.

Any other ideas for programs I could use?