I tried autogk. It gives you an option of how well you want the quality to be preserved. I put 100% and i could definitely tell the quality was not so great. My resolution is set to 1920 x 1200 so it's really easy to notice the quality downgrade. Someone suggested just making ISOs but man do those take up a lot of room.
Do you know if there is anyway to make an ISO or movie file that preserves dvd quality but gets rid of extras? maybe that will decrease the size.
Handbrake is your friend.
http://handbrake.fr/It has a learning curve, but it the best program I have ever used for re-encoding. I encode high profile x264 in .mkv containers and the file sizes usually work out around 1.7 gigs for a 2 hour movie. It is generally near-impossible to tell a quality difference from the original dvd...and this is from a 1080p projector on an 8-foot wide screen in my theater.

Feel free to message me if you need some help with settings.
Oh, and if you try this on your own and you use the Constant Quality setting, do NOT use 100%. Go with something in the low 60's, like 63% maybe. Personally I find constant quality flaky regardless, so I use good old fashioned constant bitrate (1800 generally).
EDIT: forgot to mention that handbrake will remove all the extras/junk