Rip a DVD

I needed to rip a DVD the other day so that I could take a movie with me on a trip.
I had a hard time finding the command to do this. Finally I found this:

mencoder dvd:// -o title2.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4

I did not play with it much but it got the DVD onto my computer and the size of the
files was 850 megabytes. I also really like that this is a command line option. If I
get board on the road I can get someone to put a DVD in the player and rip and download it
without having to run any GUI over the internet.

mencoder is part of the mplayer system. I also had to track down the libdvdcss2
package and get it installed.