Tech Guru Needed for Deployment Gift

To say I love movies might just be an understatement. I have quite the DVD library and I love each and every movie in my collection. Because we are always home with our cute doodle puppies and doggies, going out to the movies isn't an option so we have movie night at home.  My collection hasn't grown much in recent years due to the ease of downloading movies off the internet but it is still a nice collection. I really want to share my DVD collection with my sweet 1st Lieutenant daughter. I want to copy my DVDs to an external hard drive and give that external hard drive to my daughter.  She will be deploying very soon and will be gone for 9-12 months.  She is going to be without an internet connection for most of that deployment.  There will be no way for her to download content - movies or music or anything internet related. She has strict regulations as to how much stuff she can bring on board and very limited storage space. Bringing a stack of DVDs just won't work. Does anybody know how to copy a DVD movie to an external hard drive?  I know there has to be some encoding changes and compression modifications but I just don't know where to start and how to get that done.  I am willing to spend hours swapping discs to fill the hard drive - but need help figuring out just how to do it.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!  I think a deployment gift filled with hours of movies might just be the perfect send off!  Thank you!