SubRip allows you to rip subtitles from your DVDs. The program saves subtitles in its own textformat (which is supported by most of the DivX players), in BMP format (which can be used with SuperVCDs), and a number of different formats as well.

Program uses semi-automatic text recognizing technology (dubbed as OCR) in order to parse the subtitles into text files (DVD subtitles are stored in picture format, not in text format -- that's why they need to be recognized as characters before they can be stored in text format). The process is fairly simple, although user (read: your own typos, etc) errors are pretty annoying to fix afterwards.

An excellent program and highly recommendable for those of us who prefer to have subtitles (always the better option than having the movie dubbed in some weird language).