This is in no way a sanction for piracy. Just rip your DVD collection for personal use only, not for distribution. Big Brother is looking… Anyway, HandBrake is one hell of an open source application, converting your DVD to MP4 or MKV with AAC and H.264 to boot.

HandBrake for Windows requires .NET 2.0 or above. For Linux Mint, just grab the Ubuntu version and start ripping.

HandBrake and VLC Player are great Windows combo apps. For Linux, it just runs out of the box.