Having a daughter who has recently found a love for watching movies and cartoons on DVD (and recently broke one), I started investing my time to get back into the ripping/encoding game. Having a 3rd-generation Apple TV as the main vehicle for displaying these movies, I became very picky/paranoid about achieving great quality encodes as I fear that as technology advances, poor decisions that I made with encoding settings will show.
So I came across Matt's post about achieving great quality encodes with Handbrake. While I understand most of the concepts and terminology that he speaks of, there's still quite a bit that are way over my head. However, Matt does a great job of pointing out what each setting does, what type of movie to apply it to, and if it will add to your encoding time.