The DVD's are copyrighted. I asked the company the same question. They said it is alright and they referred me to cnet.com. However, cnet is a general site.As an example, it is like buying a bunch of VASST DVD's and putting them on your personal computer for personal use to facilitate viewing and prevent damage to the originals.

You would just have to use a ripping program to copy them to the hard drive which can be huge storage or use something like Nero Recode to compress them down to MP4 which will save you on storage size dramatically.

Assuming everyone is OK on backing them up or creating a reference library, I would suggest that your re-encode to meg4, DIVX, XVID or real(I didn't type that) for the best possible compression.

Are these interactive? If so you need to maintain the menu structure otherwise
I like VLC from Videolan.org. (free software)

We convert the mpeg/VOB file to a TS (transport stream) file and you can either just
share them on the local network or "multicast" if you are having an in-house
training session on several computers.

One way you could do it:

Rip the DVDs to an ISO disk image.

Put the ISO disk images whereever you want.

Then use Daemon Tools and mount the required images; I think Daemon Tools allows something like 8 simultaneously mounted images; looks then like you have 8 DVD drives with the respective DVD inserted.

Use something like Power DVD and you can have all of those DVDs available instantly available any time.

All disk imaged could be on one big drive but they would look like seperate DVD drives.

I have done this before some other things. Works great.

Thanks alot for all your input.

We've established that the DVDs are copyrighted. However they may not be copy-protected. If they are not then you can make an ISO (or NRG in Nero, or MDF in Alcohol) and certainly in the case of the ISO or NRG then VLCplayer will play this file directly. No need to mount with DaemonTools or Alcohol.

VLCplayers ability to open or have ISO dropped on it makes for a fantastic juke-box. One where you can feasibly network amongst any other fast wired-LAN/wireless-LAN around your premises. Very very handy and almost easy!

If the DVD is copy protected then you may need to remove the CSS DRM. This is illegal in many parts of the world. However the tools to do this are almost household names like MP3 and MPEG4. Go figure.