DVD's are already compressed. The only reason to 'rip' one is to post it to a newsgroup or something. I can't understand why you would want to save a DVD on your hard drive unless you have 100's of gigabytes at your disposal. One single-sided DVD can hold 4.7G. Now analog music CD's are a different story. If you have a bunch of analog music CD's, you could create your own MP3 files from them. This would definately be a worthwhile endevor since you could put hundreds of MP3'd songs on a single data CD. And even more if you use DVD media. But in either case, there is really no reason to attach the PC to the entertainment center. However, if you had a TV tuner or video capture card in the PC, then that might be a different story. In that case you could use it like a Tivo system and record/delay playback live TV. You could also digitize your camcorder tapes if you have them. But again, unless you have unlimited hard drive capacity, the best place to store these is on optical media.
