You ruled out 3 rippers

[oliverredfox]

You ruled out 3 rippers because they require a separate program.  Running your ripper and encoder separately will offer you more options.  I typically use DVDFab Decrypter or MakeMVK (both free) to extract the video from my discs (a lot of people use AnyDVD to skip the middle man and if you’ve got the money for it, it really is a great program).

I typically re-encode my videos with Handbrake since it’s fast, high quality video(x264 is one of the best out there), and lets me adjust the output.  Lately I’ve swapped to using Badaboom2 to take advantage of QuickSync.  While some people like using CUDA or other video card offloads, I generally prefer using CPU encoding since the video quality is better.