I have not done a DVD to VCD trasfer. What I did is I made a copy of a VCD movie from CD to CDRW when I was testing my DVD Changer. The VCD that I copied was high quality and manufactured by the studio (no bootleg version from Asia). The quality of the VCD from the studio is at least the quality of VHS. You will get Dolby Surround but definitely not DD5.1.
I have heard from various web sites that it is possible to transfer a DVD to a CD and keeping the format the same. However, you'll end up having 6-7 CDs for one movie. Each CD will hold roughly 15 minutes of MPEG2 video with DD5.1 audio.
You can also transfer a DVD to a VCD format. However, you'll lose the picture quality as well as DD5.1 sound. This way you only need 2 CDs per movie.
Either way, it requires a lot of hard drive space and a lot of programs to be running to get everything done the right way. I don't really think it's worth to try it.
The VCDs I bought was about 2 years old but I guess no one liked them and I don't see them anymore. Bootleg VCDs are a different story, however.
