Program to play stored movies

[PharmBoy]

I saw my brothers mythtv yesterday and loved the movie interface it had.
I don't do linux and don't think I will be setting up a mythtv anytime soon.
Is there a way that I can store copies of my movies that I backed up to a harddrive as the video_TS format and then have a program access that file.
I would like it to not only play the movie but also access the imdb website and collect information about the movie and display that on a page along with the dvd color and descriptions for you to choose from. That sounds like alot and guess it really is.

[redwudz]

Yes, you can copy your DVDs, minus encryption to your hard drive, but at ~7GB per DVD, you would need a lot of room if you had a quite a few of them. Just use DVDFab Decrypter to copy.

Alternately, you could also use DVD Shrink and get them down to ~5GB each. Or use a codec like Xvid or Divx and reduce them down to about 2GB without too much more quality loss, but you would loose the chapters and menus.

Once you have any of the above formats on the hard drive, there are quite a few players you could use for playback. I use VLC Media Player and Zoom Player Pro. Or just for DVD format, PowerDVD will play them back just like they were a DVD disc. You would need a video card that would output to your TV or whatever device you want to view them on.

That's all pretty simple. I use five 300GB hard drives in my video server for storage, but I don't store full DVDs, I use a DVD player for that. The server has mostly Xvid or Divx videos. Accessing the IMDB site and the rest can probably be done without too much work with a software program and some script writing.

[PharmBoy]

Accessing the IMDB site and the rest can probably be done without too much work with a software program and some script writing.

I can do all of the above and don't mind spending the money for storage as I dont have that many DVDs mainly the ones from the kids. I want them to be able to look at a computer which also has an output to my television through my all in wonder card and for them to run a program that opens and has my copied movies displayed by dvd cover (they can't read yet but can operate a computer) where they can click on the cover and it play the movie or move the arrow buttons down to hilight the desired movie and hit enter making it play on the television.