I have been using Handbrake for ripping DVDs (on a iMac though I believe there is a version for PCs). It is free. The files converted have been played with video player as they haven't played on mplayer. If converting tv shows, you can batch them on Handbrake as it does them one at a time.

Personally, I wouldn't use media converter for this application as it doesn't rip from DVDs and I am against in principal spending more time converting content than actually watching it.

DVD Ripping and Video Conversion software (on Mac): Handbrake (free)
Horizontal Resolution: 352
Video Bitrate: 448
Audio Bitrate: 128
Single Pass (though 2 pass worked as well)
FPS: 15

This is based somewhat on what I have seen in the forums and a lot of iterations in getting something to work.

For me, the video quality is perfectly acceptable. This probably could be optimized more, but I got tired doing it myself and settled once the result was satisfactory. Again, these videos would not run on mplayer but they do run on the built in video player.

Also, I should note that the video file size does not appear to change that much regardless of what settings are selected (e.g. FPS or video bitrate).