NOTE: When adding useful contributons to this thread, please just batch a few programs into one single post, so that future referals to a certain program mentioned in the thread are easier to follow.
Also please ONLY add freeware programs!
(http://dvdshrink.org/what.html) This is an awesome tool, pretty much invaluable for ripping DVDs. What it does is take the .VOB files containing the movie from your chosen DVD, and then allows you to crop off the titles, credits, menus, as well as extraneous audio & subtitle tracks, and adjust the compression ratio so you can fit the movie onto a standard 4.7Gb DVD-R. The newest version (3.2) allows you to burn to DVD-R through Nero straight after ripping the .VOBs, so it pretty much does it all for you. Most people who do a lot of DVD ripping swear by DVD Decrypter (http://www.dvddecrypter.com/), and that's fair enough as they both do pretty much the same thing, but I find DVDShrink to be more straightforward, more customizable, as well as generally faster. I recommend using DVD Decrypter as a 'brute force' measure if for some reason DVDShrink refuses to work.
A program you can use to convert the .VOB files from DVDShrink/DVD Decrypter to DivX .avi files. Very simple to use (3 step process: open stream, set output file, choose video/audio compression, and you're off), pretty quick conversion/compression rate, and great results.
http://www.divxland.org/software.htm
A scripting language, Avisynth scripts (.avs files) can be loaded into a frameserver and used to augment the properties of a video stream (an .avi, .mpeg, or frameserved signpost). Best of all they're open source, incredibly flexible, and have some great minds developing them.
http://avisynth.org/
"Vdub" is a frameserver, and can work with .avs scripts or a slew of filters designed for its UI (http://www.videoxone.de/vdfilters/cgi-bin/filterlist_e.pl). You can run an .avi out from the timeline of your favorite NLE, provided you've got a frameserver plugin (such as this one: http://www.debugmode.com/pluginpac/frameserver.php), and use Vdub to surprising effect to do a million and one things to your video. Deshaker 1.6 (http://biphome.spray.se/gunnart/video/deshaker.htm), for instance, is a free answer to many more costly alternative "software stabilizers," and what's more it does a better job.
Frameserving saves you render times and disk space by, essentially, using a host app to "play" a video stream as a filtering app "watches" the stream go past. The settings and filters you've placed in the filter app change the footage relative to the speed of your machine and, in the end, viola!
You've got the effect you've aimed for.
http://virtualdub.org/
A patched version of the original, lossless codec (http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/huffyuv.html). HuffYUV is what you're going to want to use when moving video streams from one app to another -- renders are big, but pretty swift, and you're assured no loss of detail from the source media.
http://cx.ath.cx/files/huffyuv
Wax is a plugin for Sony's Vegas that adds some much needed functionality to the Vegas timeline -- as a plugin and filter dock, it allows you to load most VDub plugins and AviSynth scripts and run them on your footage from the timeline. It adds a lot of 3d functionality -- load 3d models from the leading 3d apps around, and extrude text. Additionally, it adds fully keyframable rotoscope/painting functions.
http://www.debugmode.com/wax/
A good no nonsense image viewer that'll open practically anything, uses some very decent resizing algorithms and does some other cool stuff.
http://www.tucows.com/preview/194967.html
NOTE: For other image viewing software, you might also want to check out this thread: http://4-ch.net/manga/kareha.pl/1100296167
whats the best software to turn divx files into DVDs complete with menus?
my DVD writer came with a copy of Sonic MyDVD, but it's like a bastard child of AOL, Realplayer and quicktime software rolled into one evil package >.< it's slow, incredibly buggy, very unstable and has stupid ways of encoding things (horay for a 1hour divx file ending up as a 7GB DVD image!)
I am looking for a freeware video editor. Basically, I just want to cut out parts of MPGs, AVIs, etc. Can anyone help me out?