So I'm running out of drive space again (another 300gb drive totalled) and I'm trying to get rid of a few uncompressed DVD rips at 7-8 gigs each.

Assuming I can deal with the quality degradation (which I'll just look at after compressing a couple), is it stupid to archive dvd's using ratdvd? It's obviously completely proprietary, and now I hear that there are no new versions and the developer has jumped ship? or something. (feel free to provide better info if that's wrong)

Is there any way to 'Un-Rat' one of these files if for some reason I want to go back to plain AVI?

Anyone else have any ideas? The only real alternative is to just AutoGK everything -- much more control over quality, no worries about proprietary codecs or backwards compatibility. But, of course, you don't get the cool DVD menus, etc.

Also, are there any competing products - that preserve dvd menus within a single avi/whatever file?

Thanks.

DVD spec will be around for a while, so why not burn them to DVD+DL?