extracting video from dvds

One of my students put me on to a shareware/open source software package called Handbrake that is a free download. It allows you to take a dvd (so long as it is not copy protected) and extract the video from it and turn it into an mpeg or an AVI file so that you can edit it. I started pulling all of the files off of dvds that my students gave me of their projects so that I can, eventually, put together a compolation disc for the class. I did ask them to hand me in data files to begin with, but only one in five did that.