Depends on the quality you want, at close to dvd resolutions (usually 640 by anything from 300-500, depending if it's full or widescreen), it migh take a day or two on a p3 using divx. At those reso's, doing 2pass rips (higher quality than 1pass), it takes my 2.6b p4 about 4 hours per hour of video, or about 6-8 hours for the average 1.5-2 hour movie - this is scrunching them down to ~700mb, and they generally look fantastic, have to get within a few feet of my monitor to tell it's not a dvd, unless you're going over 2 hours, in which case the quality suffers a little if you want it all on one cd. You could look into xvid, which is supposedly a good deal faster than divx without sacrificing quality. If you have a dvd burner, you can avoid all that.