Can anybody recommend a DVD ripper that will rip modern DVDs?

Have you tried VLC? A how-to is http://www.wikihow.com/Rip-DVDs-with-VLC.

AnyDVD helps break those locks put on many newer DVDs.

I've used MTR 4 and has worked on DVDs that MTR 2 and others have failed on (including Ponyo). I went through the whole "gifting" process which is pretty annoying and winds up being fairly expensive ($50 or more IIRC). to copyright police: I'm in Canada where breaking DRM is legal for fair dealing purposes, at least for now

Unfortunately, AnyDVD doesn't run on the Mac. It's Windows-only.

Welcome to the joys of ARccOS protection - hell, there's plenty of hardware players that don't handle it. Who would have thought that deliberately corrupting a disc's allocation table, creating recursive links, or pointing to errored / out of bounds sectors would cause problems? I don't see too many ARccOS-protected disks, but the latest … ummm, "easily available" … versions of RipIt or ZippyRippy have worked for me in the past. It's a bit of a crapshoot as to which will work on any given disc, but so far at least one of them always has. The RipIt author seems fairly responsive to reports of problem discs, but you might as well start with ZippyRippy as it's free for the first few (10?) uses. (And yeah, the whole MTR thing is 10 types of crazy. At this stage, it's pretty much only the remaining die-hard fanboys propping it up…)

Use http://www.metakine.com/products/fairmount/ and copy the VIDEO_TS folder off the disc. You can open the resulting folder using the DVD Player app.

The way I've found to use Handbrake even with the DVDs that have deliberately confusing TOCs is to start the DVD and note the exact run time of the movie (click the elapsed time until it shows time remaining). Make a note of it, then scan in Handbrake and convert the file entry with the exact same time. There will be some trial and error and some DVDs are very clever about blocking this (the decoy tracks are made up of actual movie bits but are in the very wrong order and will make watching the movie an exercise in the WTFism). To date there's been one disk I've been unable to copy this way and it was a recent movie by Pixar.

I thought somebody pointed it out above, but it seems not: Fairmount won't help in these cases. Specifically, it can't handle anything beyond standard CSS encryption (because all it does is act as a shim, passing the encrypted data to the libraries used by VLC and presenting it as a dummy drive). It http://www.metakine.com/products/fairmount/faq.html#faq1 on discs with ARccOS or similar types/levels of protection. If Handbrake (uses VLC's libdvdcss), VLC (ditto), or MTR 2.66 (its own copy of libdvdcss, + early ARccOS work-arounds) won't work, then Fairmount definitely wont. As fenriq suggests, if you're just interested in converting the movie to a video file then it's sometimes possible to work around some of the deliberately-errored discs of this type by trial-and-error - but that generally won't work when ripping to copy the DVD structure. For example, you'll still fall victim to the typical ARccOS trick of making the VIDEO_TS.IFO file appear to be 10x the size of the actual disc capacity…

http://www.makemkv.com/ so far has been getting the job done. It hasn't failed on a disk yet. Once I have the MKV I can either play it in VLC or use handbrake to produce a smaller file. Thanks all for the suggestions.