OK
You will want
this AWESOME plugin for MCE - My Movies
Now the next question is, encode or just shrink. What I do is encode the movies I don't care too much about to mpeg4 to save space. The others I shrink the entire DVD to ISO format which can preserve the menus and everything if you want. The latter just eats up a ton of hard drive space.
To encode to mpeg4 you can do lots of things, I use
DVD Decrypter and
AutoGK to get the job done.
To simply shrink or rip the DVD to ISO I use
DVD Shrink.
To play those ISO's in My Movies you need
Daemon Tools.
What you end up with is an onscreen, searchable, browsable database of your movies using the My Movies plugin. Another outstanding thing about is you can enter your movies into its database but tell it to leave the movie offline. So if you selected it to play it will tell you to go find the disk and put it in the DVD drive. If you have a numbering system it could tell you what number to go grab out of your DVD shelf, etc.
Ripping the movies to the hard drive does take some time, but for me and many of my friends it's not something we'd give up. Couple of my buddies love it because it keeps their kids from ruining their disks.
