how to convert my personal DVDs into harddisk images and play them ?

[docesam]

The problem :

i have a large collection of family video DVDs i would like to take DVD images of them and store those DVD images on a hard drive so that our old man (my father) can easily select and watch any one of them.
and yes you figured it out : he barely can figure out how to do that and can not afford anything more complex than that

i do NOT want to use any codec conversion software (e.g DVD to Divx file) because of 2 reasons:
a- if the original DVD was broken we want to be able to easily make a DVD copy of them .
b- because it takes long time to convert a DVD to another codec . it takes imgburn 4 minutes to make one DVD image but codec conversion software take ages and we have a lot of DVDs.

the DVD images format HAS TO be standard format (i.e not dependent on a particular manufacturer for example) so he can keep them for long time without changes .

i need :

1- a program (preferably free) to make DVD images.

2- a program (preferably free) that allow our old man to watch the video by merely double clicking on the DVD image file (simplicity is the key).

we use windows XP professional. storage space is not a problem.

any help on how to do that will be appreciated.

[UncasMS]

you could simply copy the audio and video_ts folders from your dvds to any harddrive and play the content easily with any decent softwareplayer

give it a try and say create a folder by the name of (eg):

DVD1

into this folder simply drag&drop your video dvd structure like:

DVD1
- Audio_TS
- Video_TS

to play the content drag and drop the main folder "dvd1" onto a softwareplayer like for example "the kmplayer" and it should normally play everything just fine

[docesam]

you could simply copy the audio and video_ts folders from your dvds to any harddrive and play the content easily with any decent softwareplayer

give it a try and say create a folder by the name of (eg):

DVD1

into this folder simply drag&drop your video dvd structure like:

DVD1
- Audio_TS
- Video_TS

to play the content drag and drop the main folder "dvd1" onto a softwareplayer like for example "the kmplayer" and it should normally play everything just fine

thank you for you valuable contribution.
i need a double click (simple) method. i am not sure if he can drag and drop i will try that and see if he can do it.

[MilesAhead]

You can use Imgburn to create .iso images from the VIDEO_TS folder. Use the Build Mode and instead of burning to DVD, output to an .iso image file. You should be able to set up a player such as VLC media player to play the image when you double click it.

You might have to resort to setting the default action to Play in Explorer(if it isn't already for .iso image files) and then setting VLC(or any other player that can play disc images directly) as the default media player.

Imgburn is simple for creating .iso images because as soon as it sees the source folder is a VIDEO_TS folder it will ask you "this is probably a DVD video so should I set the file system types to yadda yadda?" and just click Yes or OK and let it do it.