In my experience, rip speed is dependent on DVD rom speed. I just ripped a home movie of mine, and CPU usage for me was very low. Analysis, shrinkage, and encoding is very CPU intensive. If you encode a DVD, not shrinking it, just encode, from one internal drive to another, what KB/s speed does DVD shrink show? If I encode from one internal SATA drive to another, I can hit 60,000 KB/s, whicjh I think is pretty good. Now, throw in an analysys, or shrink it, and it slows way down.