Damn DVDs

Being a film nut and being overseas can be tough. So, to help comfort me in the cold, bleak winter nights when I'm trapped miles from anywhere in my 4-star hotel (it's a hard life) I rip some of my DVDs onto my hard disk so that I can watch movies without carrying extra weight, or risking the loss of my originals (I don't own a DVD burner, a travesty I know, but as someone who doesn't use either of his CD burners and couldn't fill 4.7 GB with anything but a DVD movie, it seemed fairly pointless).

To do this I use a freeware program called DVD Shrink. It rips and compresses the DVDs onto my HDD. Unfortunately, this is not a fast process and it means I end up with one of my machines working all weekend just to rip a half-dozen DVDs for my next two-week stint. So, does anyone know a faster (and, ideally, easier) way to do it?

UPDATE
Ooh, I just found some nifty little guides at Doom9, DVDShrink.org and Mr Bass that look promising for just ripping the movie (I don't want all the flippin' extras, and especially not extra languages), which should save space and time.