Gknot, the best way to encode without making mistakes. DrDivx is rather gash infact, i would not really recommend its use. Its rather suprising that its an official divx product given its not very good at encoding to divx.
VirtualDubMod and/or Nandub are excellent at encoding, if you know how to do it properally, essentially gknot is a front end for virtualdubmod, nandub and a few other quality programs so it guides you through ripping from a DVD to a nicely sized xvid.
Chopping off the end credits means its useless if you ever want to reshare since the hash will change, however it will make it fit. You can also remux the audio changing the interleaving. For example, if an AC3 movie is interleaved at 64ms, you can change it to 96ms and the filesize will drop by a mb or two. Means there's no change to the video too so no loss of quality anywhere.
The best option though is to invest in a dvd writer, they are exceptionally cheap now, i mean you can get a brand new top of the range one for ~?40, and 1dvd-r is cheap than 6cdrs and there's actually a bit more space than 6cds on a dvdr. Have a look at pioneer or nec, i have a pioneer 109 and its excellent at what it does. if your in the uk:
http://www.121cdr.co.uk
Hope there's something useful in that.
