I know Davnes already responded to these, but just to make sure your bases are covered, I will let you know the things I use.

1. Before I switched to a Mac, I always used DVD Decrypter. It is freeware and it has never taken me more than half an hour to copy a DVD9, even when I was using a slower system. I used it once through boot camp on my Mac, and it took about 15 minutes or so to rip a DVD5.

When I need to make a still capture from a DVD video, I just load it into VLC (another brilliant freeware program), and it has a feature to capture it to .bmp files (convert them to jpeg if you like).

2. vixy.net has always worked wonderfully for me. Just copy and paste the address and it will do it for you right there and let you download your file when it is done. Or it even has a downloadable desktop version (again freeware, but with a very minor ad banner) which has also worked wonders for me. It even converts it from the flv format to the file type of your choosing. Out of all the format options it has, avi would work best for what you are doing.

3. Just a video capture board. You'd just have to run whatever you want to record from through it onto the computer. You'll be able to capture whatever video comes through the card. You mentioned videogames, if you want to capture footage of older videogames, then you are in great shape because you can use emulators to play them on your PC and capture them from there. Of course anything beyond the PSX N64 era is rather dodgy through emulation, if not impossible to emulate.