[ale] DVD ripping

[hscast at charter.net (Scott Castaline)]

Ok I've just started playing around with DVDs on my Linux box. After 
playing a few, I decided to rip them so that the DVD would be on my hard 
drive allowing me to play from hard drive instead of the DVD player. I 
realize that DVD ripping is more involved that CD ripping, but this is 
getting to be very frustrating. I have installed DVD::rip and tried 
ripping a tv series dvd. I went through the setup as stated in the docs, 
but I keep getting errors. The first one happens almost right away when 
I click on the "Read DVD TOC". I'll get:

Failed to copy the IFO files. vobsub creation won't work properly.
(Did you specify the mount point of your DVD drive in the Preferences?)
The error message is:
Failed to mount DVD at /media/blahblahblah...........

I've done all that I've found to supposedly fix it. The device selected 
is /dev/scd0, and the error message even contains the DVD title, that is 
loaded. So I ignore the error and continued, selecting all titles 
displayed. The program goes through the ripping and creates 3 folders 
under the DVD title folder of avi, tmp, & vob. Tmp will have a bunch of 
files and vob seems to have the individual video files from the DVD. The 
avi folder in the meantime is empty. I can play with my either totem or 
gxine or mplayer the individual videos. Is there another step that I 
need to take? How do I actually resolve the first error?

After spending several hours on it yesterday, I even tried using k3b, 
dvdrip was suddenly able to read the TOC of one of the DVDs, but it was 
indicating that it was going to take over 3 hours to rip the 2nd of 10 
titles, so I quite and canceled. Today I deleted all that I had done and 
started all over. The first error is back.

Any ideas? If not clear it's ok to contact me off list.

TIA