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Can anyone recommend me some good software (free is good) to do this.

Depends what you want to turn the DVD video into. DivX or Xvid are great for keeping almost all the quality and reducing the filesize to fit it on a single CD (700MB). You may want to make a VCD or SVCD to play on most normal DVD Players. VCD is VHS style quality whereas SVCD is much closer to DVD but will take up more CDs than DivX/Xvid. Dr DivX is a program which specialises in ripping DVDs to DivX format, should be very easy to use.

If you want to duplicate the DVD (for a backup presumably) you should start with something like DVDdecrypter which strips the DVD of regionality and copy protection and dumps it to your HD (4.5-9GB usually). Then you could use something like DVD2One which can allow you to specify what you wish to copy from the DVD, this way you can fit it on a single blank DVD disc. I think then all you do is burn it (Nero?), maybe you author it first. I've never actually done it myself!

Just bought my first DVD burner last weekend. It's the NEC 8X (DVD +R/-R) one.

I have much to learn.

What I really wanted was an easy way to fit multiple VCDs/SVCDs onto a single DVD-R disk. Turns out it really isn't that simple. Looking into trying to make a DVD-SVCD disk, which isn't really a standard, but is compatible with most standalone players.

I have much to learn.

You might want to check this site for some tips:

http://www.doom9.org

Nice choice, I have the NEC ND2500 8x +&-, seems great. It certainly is possible to make a DVDR which contains multiple SVCD encodes best defined as chapters AFAIK. All you should need is the right authoring program ... but I can't rem what!

I downloaded XvID Player version 2.1, and DivX player. I cant seem to see how to rip the DVDs. I cant even open them to play.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Those are players to play xvid and divx encoded files. Those won't do anything with DVDs.

The first thing you need to do is get a DVD ripper. I'm hesitant to link anything for fear of attracting the wrath of the MPAA, seeing as how they hate DeCSS and try to sue everything under the sun regarding that bit of software.

After that, you then need to use a program which will encode the bare VOB files that you've just extracted off of the DVD into whatever format you want. You mentioned mpeg so your best bet would be a program like TMPGEnc or something.