Ripping my movie collection

I believe one way is just to purchase an external DVD burner. 
I used to have one, but don't have any specs for you, sorry.

It was a fairly straight-forward process.  The software was included.

I'd imagine one type would be for WIN and another for Mac.

Buy and HDMI in country.  They're isn't much of a difference in price.

Assuming your collection is legal, there are no copyright issues in making a single copy for your own use.
There are many ways of doing this, but they all require time and effort.
When I decided on the move to Indonesia, I had two laptops ripping my DVD collection every free moment I had.
Loads of software around to do it, so no worries there, but you have to decide the output quality against available storage space.
At the time, I ripped most to WMV at quite a low quality because I simply didn't have the hard drive space to do much more, but high capacity drives are easily available now, so I would suggest you save at a higher quality.

If you're really pushed for time, and have loads of drive space available, you can simply copy the DVD's files directly to a hard drive, but most films are a little over 4gb each, so drive space runs out a lot faster than if you save in AVI or MKV, usually at 1 gb or less, but still maintaining good quality.

Direct copying of DVDs, without processing to another format, would allow about 238 films onto a 1TB hard drive.
Remember to set up a folder for each DVD, then just drag and drop the files.
With processing to another format (Less a gigabyte each), you'll get a thousand or more on the same drive.

Any advice on formats? AVI, MP4, MKV?