Recommend software to rip DVD video to an AVI or MPEG?

[Ral-Clan]

Hi, I transferred some of my old home videos (analogue) to DVD with a deck-type DVD recorder.

Now I want to be able to put the DVD in my laptop, extract the video, and convert it to MPEG or AVI (which is what my video editing software requires).

Is there any freeware (Windows) to do this?  I have searched quite a bit, but most of it seems geared to ripping the whole disc for conversion to Xvid or Divx CD-Rs, not for camcorder editing.

I'd also like to find something that extracts the DVD video without splitting up the video along chapter points.  These are music videos (my old bands) and I don't want to get any audio dropouts from having to patch together split video segments.

[Ral-Clan]

So what exactly is .wmv (Windows Media Video)?  Is it just a new name for .avi, or is it an .avi using Windows proprietary video encoding scheme?  I've noticed that if you rename an .avi to an .wmv it still plays in most media players.

[Ral-Clan]

Thanks, Handbrake looks promising and someone has also recommended SUPER to me.  

I have some old fairly amateurish video editing software: Ulead Video Studio and VideoMaker III (Windows 98, Windows XP versions).