Partial success with ripping DVDs

[Darcy Burnard]

Hi everyone.  Well, I think Mac the ripper might be a good solution  
for ripping the audio from a dvd.  You can have it just extract the  
ac3 audio stream.  I tested it on an episode of Saturday Night Live  
which I believe was 1 hour and twelve minutes in length.  It took just  
over 10 minutes to extract the file.
Now I have this ac3 file on my hard drive which vlc can play just  
fine, but I want to convert it to either mp3 or aac so that it takes  
up less space, and so that I can put it on my ipod.  I did find an ac3  
codec for quicktime.  Once I installed that, the file would play in  
quicktime player.  I was hoping it would play in itunes as well, so  
that I could use itunes to transcode the file, but no such luck.   
Itunes won't touch the file.
I'm thinking that quicktime pro could convert the file, but I'd like  
to know for sure before plunking down the $37 Canadian that Apple  
wants for quicktime pro.  I don't know if any of you have quicktime  
pro or not, but for those who do, I have a question.  Can I safely  
assume that if QT can play a file type, that it could convert that  
file to another type?
Alternatively, does anyone know of another way to convert ac3 files in  
to something else?
Darcy