I've ditched my DVD player in favor of an Apple Macintosh mini in my home entertainment system. My theory is that the mini has a DVD player built in, and the fact that it has an operating system and a hard drive means I can copy movies from the DVDs onto the hard drive and access them instantly.
I used the free program Handbrake to rip the DVDs to MP4 files and put those into iTunes on my mini. There are many different programs and many different quality settings to choose, but I found that MP4 works nicely without having to wait for an hours-long conversion. Each of my movies converts in about 45 minutes.
The Leopard operating system has a new version of Front Row that is identical to the Apple TV interface.
This means the small remote control that came with the mini can call up Front Row and let the user scroll through the content (movies) without a keyboard or mouse.
But in the interest of full disclosure, I use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for my setup because the mini is behind a closed cabinet door. When Front Row is activated, it presents a list of movies from iTunes complete with DVD cover art that I had collected and applied to the files in iTunes.
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