DVD ripping without a DVD burner?

For the subtitles, you’ll want to use a program called SubRip. Here is a subtitle guide. You can extract the audio with DVD2AVI, but I usually use the audio programs from the process listed earlier.

This guide explains DARs better than I can.

It’s worth noting that if you use DVD2SVCD, the program will do all three of the things you asked about - subtitles, letting you pick an audio stream, and figuring out the aspect ratio and putting the proper settings into your AVIsynth file for it.

One thing you might want to try is working with small video files. Things will get done faster that way and you’ll be able to try more new things in less time. For example, instead of ripping a whole DVD to work with, just rip one chapter. For encoding, you can cut it down even further with the “Trim()” function in AVIsynth.