“The VLC media player (VLC) is a versatile tool. It can handle
virtually any media file, it can play network streams such as
Internet radio stations, and it can stream media contents across
the network. But that’s not all; VLC can also ‘stream’ media to a
file in a user-defined format, which makes it a handy transcoding
tool. The most obvious use of this feature is to backup your film
DVDs, a process that VLC makes straightforward. While VLC doesn’t
support so-called DVD shrinking (fitting a film onto a single-layer
DVD or even CD), it’s perfectly capable of converting an entire
film into a single file that you can play in any media player,
including VLC itself…”