For converting video discs to something that'll play on your cell or tablet or media player box there are guides at videohelp.com, plus advice in the forums. This is a quickest summary of what you'll find -- it's not meant to replace that stuff, but only to give you an idea of how this sort of thing works. Most of the freeware conversion apps started as a way to combine separate steps to make learning less necessary. Most of the Chinese converters offer a subset of the functions in the best freeware alternatives, with the focus on being as easy as possible -- if you knew how to do this stuff then you would not be one of their target customers, willing to pay sometimes quite a few dollars. In a nutshell you're paying to make converting video as painless as possible. You're paying not to have to bother with things like choices.
If that sounds negative it's really not meant to be. I'm just being purely practical. If you want to watch video using your tablet, cell, or media player, the easiest way of all is to just stream it. If you don't want to pay for a premium service, or if they don't have what you want to watch, or if you don't want to pay for the data transfer, but you've got a PC/laptop, then you can convert video you do have to work on those devices. The Chinese ffmpeg-based converters may well be the easiest way to do that. Or you can approach it from another direction... If you want higher quality than you get streaming you can do the conversion yourself, but then the focus is on quality rather than being easy.
If you look at it that way, then much of the discussion about video converters [on GOTD & elsewhere] is really focusing on the wrong things. If you're happy with the costs & quality streaming, then obviously converters &/or discs hold no interest for you. You might say DVDs/Blu-Rays are dead -- I say go away. :) If you're after the easiest video conversions for your hand-held or media player box, then the Chinese converters are likely tops. They can be buggy from version to version, but most are also very near portable, so grab them when you can & you'll likely have something that works when you want it to -- if your 1st choice doesn't do it, move on to the next.
If OTOH you're after quality, one word -- learn. You can still use the Chinese apps if you want, but Do realize their strengths & weaknesses, using them when/where they're strongest, supplementing them as needed by doing extra work. Don't expect any converter to achieve the highest quality possible -- don't expect any converter designed to be easy to match the highest quality possible using a converter where you can, & are often expected to make all the settings yourself. Yes, it's possible for someone to get the same results for example using the Wonderfox converter & say the Simple x264 Launcher, but primarily if they don't know what to set with that 2nd program. If someone says the results are identical, they may not know what settings to use, or they may not be able to tell, either because they don't know what to look for, or the display they used isn't capable of displaying anything better. Please remember that now I'm talking about it from purely a quality perspective -- you Don't have to take that approach, but if you do, arguing the relative quality of one Chinese converter vs. another [at the same settings] likely doesn't mean much.
Now, to deliver on the promise of my 2nd sentence up top, here are the basic steps to get video from a disc playing on your tablet, cell, &/or media player box. [Myself, I'm more inclined to fire up HBO Go or similar, so this isn't a guide as much as it is a summary of what the guides will tell you.] 1st get the DVD copied to your hard drive, in the VIDEO_TS folder. If your software of choice won't open it as-is, use the free DVD Shrink to copy the main title to another folder, setting the options to just one VOB file -- it's important that you don't have Shrink set to reduce the size, or else you lose quality needlessly. Optionally you can trim off the end credits, &/or remove audio/sub streams you don't want.
The free PgcDemux will quickly copy the individual audio, video, & subtitle streams from the VIDEO_TS folder to another folder, and it can give you a text file with the chapter times. The video will be an mpg2 .m2v file, without the audio & timing info in a .mpg. There are advantages & disadvantages to separate files -- you can join the audio & video together, or split them up using what's called a muxer [to join] or demuxer [to split apart] -- there are many available at videohelp.com. One advantage is that you can work with the audio file separately -- you can also set the AC3 audio aside, & add it back to the AVC video out of one of the many ffmpeg converters, by using a demuxer/muxer for that format... the original AC3 is better quality than you'll get with the AAC or mp3 that may be your only option with the converter [it's not that mp3 or AAC are lower quality necessarily, but the conversion loses quality].
If you want subs use the free Subtitle Edit to OCR them from the DVD folder [VIDEO_TS]. There are also different tools to extract the CC if it's embedded in the mpg2 file, but that is more involved -- see CCExtractor. The results either way should be a plain text file with special markup with the filename extension .srt. Name that the same as your converted AVC video file, e.g. somevideo.mp4 next to somevideo.srt, and most Android [& many PC] players will give you the option to display the subs.
The video conversion itself is pretty straightforward, though you will likely have to run a test or three to determine the best settings. For my tab I crop off the letterboxing & use square pixels, & depending on the player I'm using, set it to fill the screen width. Generally I like to set the AVC bit rate to 1.3-1.5, and use all of the AVC optimizations, but this is of course up to you.
For Blu-Ray there are plenty of tools that do the same job as PgcDemux, most based on Tsmuxer &/or eac3to -- you can use most any one of those, or use Tsmuxer or the much newer Tsmuxer Beta on its own. Subtitle Edit works the same way, though there is no CC embedded [ever], so CCExtracter is normally out of the question. The biggest problem you may encounter is that 1080p video means working with an awful lot of pixels, which means quite a bit of processing, which is why involving the graphics hardware is so very common. And That is a can of worms dependent on the hardware you use & what software & drivers you've installed.
A common Blu-Ray protection is to have fake playlists -- if your software does not select the right one you won't be able to watch the full movie as intended [it might play scenes out of order, skip scenes, or just stop playing however many minutes into the movie]. If the movie plays, logically it's pretty much impossible to tell if you've got the right playlist until you watch it all the way through. That means you've got to accept some risk, whether it's taking a leap of faith & waiting until you watch the converted video, or watching it before the conversion, with the risk that you'll be wasting your time.
Generally speaking you want to accelerate decoding, processing, & encoding -- you may or may not be able to accelerate all 3, but that's your goal. Ffdshow &/or the LAV Filters might help, but you'll have to experiment with different software & graphics drivers based on your hardware. If you have an add-on graphics card + a CPU with its own GPU built in, you *may* be able to use both. Intel has Quick Sync, Nvidia has Cuda, AMD/Ati has stream, & all 3 have OpenCL [OCL]. You can also use Windows Direct X Video Acceleration with all 3 -- it's usually slower than the other options I just listed, but it's better than nothing.
I'll end with a couple of cautions...
One, there are several conversion tools for AC3 &/or DTS audio -- many [most? - all?] have built-in optimizations, e.g. normalization, that are often far from optimal. Particularly with DTS, watch for channel pair volume settings that are WAY too high -- they can be straight out of the theater settings, & worse case, conversions can have a lot of clipping. Very high volume dynamic range is also common -- DVD/Blu-Ray players automatically compensate, adding dynamic compression, depending on what you've selected in their settings. Your conversion to something like mp3 or AAC may not include adding that compression, so check it & add compression in an audio editor if desired.
[I use an archaic, ancient really method using graphedit & PowerDVD 8 in XP [doesn't work in newer] to get stereo wav files with dynamic compression from 5.1 AC3 or DTS. To edit & re-encode something like 5.1 AC3 from a broadcast I'll 1st use some old tools with Avisynth in VirtualDub to get a .w64 file I can edit & then re-encode to 5.1 AC3 with Vegas Pro.]
Two, there are several apps that promise lightning fast video conversions or encoding because they're heavily optimized for one of the 3 brands of GPUs. Many of the available GPU functions are lower quality -- that's one reason many pro & mid-range apps don't use all of them. On top of that, encoding software that's focused on speed often [most always in my experience] takes shortcuts, regardless the loss of quality. If you primarily want speed that's fine, but be aware that you're making that compromise.
I have not found an ffmpeg app, or version of ffmpeg itself, that has AMD GPU acceleration that works properly on this system -- your mileage of course may vary. Depending on the software I'm using I can use Quick Sync & Stream, plus OCL & DXVA with both my Intel CPU/GPU & AMD graphics card, so this rig is capable, but for me at least ffmpeg doesn't work well using anything other than pure CPU power.
As far as speed & quality go please remember this -- for AVC, ffmpeg uses the x264 encoder, which is what it is, regardless the front end software that uses it. The x264 encoder does however have quite a few optimization & quality vs. speed settings. Is the brand X converter faster because it uses lower quality settings, &/or is brand Y higher quality but slower because it uses higher quality settings? In most cases you'll never know for sure, and you might or might not be able to tell the difference watching the video with your hand-held. Whenever somebody says this is best or that is the fastest, please bear that in mind. That said, since this is a competitive field, with software all based on more or less the same code & methods, differences are likely to be subtle.