I have a load of dvd’s that I recorded from vhs. I now want to store them on a HTPC. What is the best way of doing this. I guess they will need some sort of compression. Can anybody recommend a program 
Also there may be a few where I would need to preserve the AC3 sound encoding
You can rip them straight to hdd with dvd decryptor, are you using mythtv, wmc, media portal… something else?
You could rip them with ‘dvd decrypter’ giving a 1-1 copy of the disk on the HD and then use ‘clonedvd’ to reduce it’s size to a dvd-r (4gb) while preserving the audio.
Media player, but I have a divx codec installed.
/ I dont really need dvd decryptor because there is no copy protection on the disks, so could I just use clone dvd and let that reduce the size?
Media player?! That’s a bit rough for a HTPC box! :p. You can use CloneDVD to reduce the size and quality, or DVDx to convert them to DivX/XviD etc…
What player would you recommend then speed’s - this is my first foray into HTPC, apart from Wattoo’s educational videos 
you using this through a tv with a remote? windows media centre 2005 is pretty well polished… Media Portal is also rather good… menus aren’t quite so user friendly but it’s in the early stages, very stable though and it can use the wmc remote… mythtv is meant to be very good but a nightmare to setup, going to look into that over the next couple of days :).
I’m not that far ahead yet. Ultimately I want a seperate pc just for playing mp3’s and watching movies. At the moment all my mp3’s, pics and video are on my server in the loft. My main pc has the screen in the lounge as a secondary monitor and I have a blue tooth mouse/kboard that I can control the pc with.
My freeview box is also hooked up to the network but to browse files I need to set up an FTP server on my server. IIRC the freeview box can only play mpg2 files.
All I do at the moment is use media player to playback the movies full screen on the secondary monitor which is the screen in the lounge.