first do you download torrents ? you 'll get a good ripper there . to put them on your ipod , i would say floola.com simply as I use it and find it much better than itune for my music plus it coverts movies/video to you ipod. have a look at it , you downoad and can put it on you ipod hard drive so you can use it on whatever pc your on but I leave it on my desktop hard drive .
burning DVD's to you PC is a nightmare. in my experience not worth the hassle. You need a good spec PC, it can take hours. it uses up all the PC resources so you cant use it for anything else and its really hard to find good easy to use software for free. There may be some good stuff you can buy but I never tried it. I'd stick to the downloading if possible, then convert to ipod suitable format if needed.
I've recently started using 'Magic Dvd Ripper' along with 'Batch DPG', both free and good compression ratio without loosing too much quality.
im currently ripping all my dvds into mp4 format, and i will hook these up to the apple tv that i have. Ideal situation is Apple tv hooked up to 32inch tv. External Hard drive linked to apple tv - 1tb drive, so i can have all movies in the one location and can use them at the click on a button. currently have 500gb of tv series and 400 gb of movies on the drive.