Easy DVD player for kids?

[PeterA]

Hello,
I have kids (age 3-9), and they love their DVD's with Shrek, Tarzan and so on. Now the problem is, except for the fact that they are hogging my DVD player, that the DVDs get scratched and dirty.
Now I had the great idea to copy the DVDs to a harddisk, and let the kids watch the movies from there (either on the computer screen or via a TV-out, whatever).
Now this all works fine, but the problem is the Software players, which are too damn complicated for kids to use!
Now my question:
Is there an EASY dvd player without a gazillion options that a 5-year old could use? Optionally, is there a DVD player that can be run without the weird ('cool') user-interfaces? My kids can all use a mouse (at least point and click) but forget about right-clicking, selecting files etc etc.

I want to create a menu system where they can just point on a picture of the the movie they want, to start playing it.

I can create everything of this, except the DVD player. Does something like this exist? I'm sure many parent would love it!

Thanks
Peter

[Rincewind256]

I have a suggestion for you!
Why don`t you rip all your DVDs to Divx-AVIs and make file-connections to them on the desktop?
Your children can watch their movies with one click and you are saving great diskspace, too.

[PeterA]

Thanks for your suggestion, but I have already tried that. It works, but it's too much work (at least the way I have done it) to rip the dvd's (with smartripper) and then convert them to AVI's with FlaskMPEG. You also loose the menues and the subtitles. I don't really have neither time nor interest to figure out why, and I have had various problems with the resulting files too.

Maybe if there was a prog which could do all the above in one sitting.... & in less than 5 minutes.

I have many DVD's, but disk space is no problem so I just thought that copying the whole shebang to the disk was the easiest for now.

I was hoping that Media Player in XP would have a COM-interface or sometyhing so I could control it from the 'outside' but I haven't checked that yet.

thanks anyway
Peter

[Batman]

Unfortunately, at this stage no such "simple" solution for backing up dvd's exists.