My friend is trying to rip DVD's to send to others

Can you suggest a few things:
A) File format suggestion (burn program turns into VOB format, how do you change to MP4 from that?)
B) Codec for viewing
C) Compression formats to send most easily to others

MeGUI with Avisynth. Forget all the other junk out there, especially the shareware-bullshit that needs a purchase to work. Use the MP4 Container with H.264 and Nero AAC, MKV works too if you want.

HDReady encoding (1280x720) with Dualpass takes around 7,5 hours for a 90 minute Video on a decent quadcore machine.

Some guides:
http://jiang-hu.org/content/installing-megui-its-associated-tools-0
http://jiang-hu.org/content/how-index-video-file-using-megui
http://jiang-hu.org/content/how-create-quick-avs-template-script
http://jiang-hu.org/content/simple-encoding-tutorial-megui

(Not all of it is required as it includes tutorials about subtitle hardcode)

Thank you!!!!!!!!! Wanted this for a while. I got huge hard drives and nothing to put on them. Now that I have a good pc I can watch video and encode like butter. Finding less uses for my dvd/video game rack.

thanks lutia, really appreciated