I figured this out a week ago actually...the best way to rip movies from dvds on a Mac. Now let me start with a disclaimer: I'm not advocating stealing movies, but if you have paid money for a dvd, and you're going on a trip and want to watch it on your iPod, then you may want to make a copy of your movie that you paid for instead of paying for it twice. With that said, this is my quick and dirty way of doing this.

Now for a while, just using Handbrake was fine. It was completely easy, and as long as I changed the encoding to MPEG-4 (FFmpeg) instead of H.264 (does not work reliably on my iPod Classic), I was fine. Recently, I've been stocking up on movies to watch on my long flight to Japan, and suddenly, Handbrake is not decoding dvds properly. I'm not sure what's changed, perhaps I updated my version of Handbrake, but I was a bit bummed. After some searching around, I discovered MacTheRipper. It's amazing! So here are the steps:

1. Insert DVD
2. Start MacTheRipper and then press Start (you may want to change the location that it saves the files to in the menu)
   
3. You now have the VIDEOTS folder on your harddrive
4. Now, start Handbrake
5. Use your VIDEOTS folder that's been ripped onto your harddrive as the source folder in Handbrake
6. Change output settings appropriately, depending on what device you'll be watching the video on
   

And that's it! It's ridiculously simple, and this way, you can actually do multiple movies at once, since Handbrake's source is now your harddrive.

Summary: Use MacTheRipper and then Handbrake
Cost: Free, both programs are open source