Long time since I used Handbreak. I'm sure halvar has some more detailed input here but if I remember correctly you could rip on the fly so to speak. Setting up a dvd for encoding would take a couple of minutes.
There are plenty of helpful videos on youtube as well. Like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_dw0NTVZiQ (a tutorial to Handbreak)
Don't use those dvd to avi tools. They are not worth it and give by today's standard poor quality videos.