DVD to DVD

Thanks for the suggestion of dvd95, that looks very relevant.
Using mencoder in "copy" mode is also a good idea.

I managed to get roughly what I wanted in a roundabout way as follows:
1) use dvd::rip to get the VOBs on to my hard drive
and convert them (via transcode) to an xvid format .avi file.
2) Use ffmpeg to convert it to a DVD-compatible mpeg:
    ffmpeg -i movie.avi -target ntsc-dvd  movie.mpeg
3) Make that mpeg into a DVD using dvdauthor. It turned out
that it fit on one DVD, for some reason.

But I am still curious about the menu structure of the
"transcode" tab in dvd::rip. Why is it that when you
select container "MPEG", the only video codecs you
can have are "SVCD" etc, and you can't have "DVD"
(i.e. a DVD-compatible MPEG video)?
And why is "MP2" the only audio option, when DVD-compatible
MPEG files have AC3 audio? Surely transcode is capable of
making the VOB file into a DVD-compatible MPEG, after all
that's roughly what the VOB file is already.

Marko