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Prolly MacTheRipper, great lil program there, using all the right libraries.

If you have some hard drive space laying around with nothing to go on it, that'll solve your problem. We used to watch our Netflix movies a lot, but over time got busier until we were lucky to watch one a month. They offered us a cheaper "secret" 2-out plan, so we're on that (ours is unlimited rentals per month, which they don't offer anymore; now the secret 2-out plan only lets you rent 4 total per month). We kept the service because we liked it so much, but our queue was moving at a snail's pace.

Recently put a new 160 gig drive in the Power Mac, and until it fills up with "real" data, it's being used as a DVD repository. Pop in a DVD from Netflix, run DVD Backup, stick it in the mail the next day. Repeat. Watch at our leisure. Eventually when the drive fills up, we'll decide whether we should keep paying for Netflix or cancel and watch what we've got as we find time.

I'm going to take this opportunity to plug our little freeware DVD ripping solution, MacTheRipper, which has more features, including removing RCE region protection, an additional type of Macrovision, some experimental UOPs removal, more extraction modes, and a better interface and compatibility. It's also still being actively developed, unlike DVDBackup. You can find it here: http://www.wormintheapple.gr/macdvd/mtr.html

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

I use DVD Backup to copy a DVD to my iBook when I take a trip but do not want to take my original DVD with me. For a thousand DVDs you will need more than a terabyte of storage, but you should be able to setup a machine to serve that over nfs maybe with a few mounts. Hook-up a mac to your plasma screen and use the DVD Player included with MacOS X to play your movies. DVD Player has a menu item 'File -> Open VIDEO_TS Folder..." that does the trick. Plus you can script DVD Player with applescript, so you can quickly hack something together that lets you choose the movie you wish to play. Then you can navigate the usual DVD menus as you wish. You can get a wireless keyboard and mouse to make navigation from your couch easier.

Don't know if you want to risk doing it, but there do exist region hacks to allow you to 'reset' your dvd region code.

Woz probably does what everyone else does and re-flashes the drive with non-RPCII firmware.

Been to the firmware page on WormInTheApple lately?

Yes. Also, if you download something like DVDBackup and use it to copy the DVD to your hard drive before your trip, the Apple DVD player can play it from there, which will probably consume less power than spinning the DVD drive would.

The Mac DVD Resource seems to be what you are looking for ?
Patches, info etc..

there's a bunch of utilities here
you can also try vlc as a last resort.

If you read the article, you would notice that the OS cheerfully lets you rip, image, and mount whole DVD's to your hard drive, so you can watch them on battery power without the added electrical drain of the disk player.

Not quite true. If you just copy the DVD by drag-and-drop, you'll probably have playback problems. (CSS and the disc name disagreeing?) Image the thing with Disk Copy and you should be fine.

Alternatively, use a program like DVD Backup to rip, DeCSS, de-region, and you're golden. Apple's DVD player will play it back just fine.

Apple actually enabled this feature (in the last six months or so) so that their DVD Player app could play back DVDs that had just been created with their DVD Studio Pro package: pre-imaging, pre-burn, just sitting there loose on the hard drive. Apple is trying to make things easier for content creators, their traditional market, and a handy side-effect for everyone else is a non-DRM solution on the table.