Having Googled in vain, I could use your help. This is clearly one of those "too stupid to have to be explained" questions.

I have not previously bothered to rip any DVD's as files to a hard drive. I do NOT have an extensive collection, because I don't typically watch one movie enough times to warrant owning it.

My main motivation is providing extra content to iPad (which I bought for Mrs. Tuttle for Mothers Day - Epic win). Except for the iPad, we are a Windows household.

I see a lot of commercial software out there. I also see some people advocate decrypting and converting as separate steps.

I used DiscRipper and it seemed to work fine, except that the audio levels are unacceptably low, even when I use iTunes to increase the playback levels by 100%. I understand that I need H.264 MP4 files.

Since I'm going to invest some time encoding, I guess I wouldn't mind having home theater quality file copies and then also converting them "down" to optimize them for iPad if that is the best path.

So, if you needed to rip some DVD content on Windows for eventual consumption on an iPad, what software and what settings would you use?

Not sure of all the details, but I use DVD Shrink 3.2 to rip my DVD's to .VOB files. I stream those, uncompressed, to my PlayStation 3.

Since I don't compress anything, I don't know what would be best for doing that for your iPad. Hopefully someone else can help you there.

Handbrake is a great option that works on PC/Mac/Linux.

I also use a Mac program called Video Monkey. It allows me to convert video files into different formats but more importantly, different sizes. I use it to recode movies to smaller file sizes to fit on my iPhone for long trips. Then I can keep TV shows to < 80 MB for 30 minutes or < 150 MB for movies. Resolution can be dialed down since the screen is so small.

I'd second the recommendation for Handbrake, but I think it doesn't actually do decrypting--you'd need another tool for that. On the Mac, I just use Fairmount, but I don't believe there's a PC version for that.

Yeah, handbrake won't decrypt. You can use VLC to both rip and re-encode, though.

Here's the download: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

And there's a guide here:
http://lifehacker.com/397573/master-your-digital-media-with-vlc

You guys are the best. Thank you so much!

I will look into VLC, handbrake and other options.

Much appreciated.