It kind of depends what you want, if you want 100% quality (and yes, this is of COURSE possible), that comes at a cost, size.
A dvd averages 4.7gb so that's the kind of space you're going to need per movie.
You can pull the VOB files directly off the thing and muck about with them to get it to work. (there are ways for re-containering these without quality loss)
When you 'pirate' a bluray, these again come in various 'quality' versions, to get a full lossless copy, is around 25GB (the size of your standard single layer bluray disc) with all the menu's stripped out that's usually as good as it gets. If you add some mild compression and noise filtering, usually aroudn 14~18gb and if you don't mind a little blocky'ness you can pull them all the way down to 9gb or so.
Personally, I wouldn't really bother with archiving dvd's as to get them within a manageable size (around 1gb in my opinion) the source quality is lacking the definition required to really make it worth your while. I'd find some form of physical way to archive them, dump/recycle all the cases and keep the discs as they're never going to be actually worth anything.
My opinion of course, but ripping dvd's just isn't worth it anymore.
The matroska (mkv) format came about when mp4 and avi just couldn't handle the quality required for the high bitrate hd stuff, so it tends to perform better with HD video anyway.
You could try lossless .mov format, that's pretty good for keeping it's quality.