Maximum PC

I searched through the topics, I even read this article on the maximum pc website: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/rip_your_movie_dvds_and_watch_them_anywhere?page=0,1

I bought a nice Qnap NAS box, slapped four 2T drives in it, and I want to start ripping my DVD's to it. I also bought a Boxee, I want to rip and stream movies to it on my new Optoma HD33 with a 120 inch screen in the HomeTheater room I'm building.

I read the article I mentioned but I dont see anything anywhere that tells me what to do with DVD43. I downloaded and installed Handbrake, slapped a DVD from The Long Way Round (with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman, awesome show) I selected the largest file out of the dropdown list, picked the Apple Universal preset and ran it. I dont have the same presets that the article mentions also.

Is it really that simple? the quality "seems" ok for a dvd displayed at 1080p on my TV, but is there anything I can do to make it better? I actually bought some software called Xilisoft DVD Ripper, but I dont know how to optimize the settings, I tried a few tests and each episode was gigantic at almost 5gig and the quality wasnt that great.

I would like to get the best quality I can but not have gigantic file sizes. Is this possible? How come Handbrake worked so easily without DVD43? I thought Handbrake didnt decrypt the dvd's? The article is from 2009 so has anything changed or gotten better, as in better software?

Im am running a decent PC with Win7 64bit, Handbrake 0.9.5. and the tests I have done seem pretty quick. I just am wondering if I am doing it correctly.
If anybody has a good How-To, or some links to good info it would be greatly appreciated. I searched Google but a zillion sites with a zillion different ways come up, plus I'm not too keen on some of the shadier sites, Id prefer to get my info from the real deal MaximumPC.
Thanks!

I rip my purchased TV show DVDs and convert them with Handbrake, but I use the 'normal' profile.

I've found this effecient for moot TV shows on DVDs.

I also convert my kids' DVD and Blu-Ray movies using Handbrake. Around 35 minutes for a Blu-Ray on a i7-2600K running stock.

My kids have a TV in their play around with a WD TV Live Plus attached to it, and their movies are stored on a local USB HDD.

I have a server with 5 2 TB drives configured for RAID 5, and I store native rips of my TV shows, Blu-Rays, and DVDs.

I use Media Browser for sorting/selection and Arcsoft Total Media Theatre 3 for playback.

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