[BigV]

Here's my advice:

Good luck.

I would love to do the same thing, and I'll be going to school on your dime in this thread.

One low-tech idea is to look to an actual networked dvd player, like you'd have a central home stereo. That saves a metric crapton of digitization space/time/effort, but does still require you to walk to the device and load it. Perhaps some kind of jukebox? One place to look is to do it like a hotel does it. You know they don't have all those current movies digitized.