cavelamb himself wrote:

A lot of these (mebe 30-40%) are copied from old VHS tapes,
so the DVD resolution issue is a non-starter.

ALL of the copies have had the MacroMedia BS removed.
(I (heart) my GoDVD box)

the 1500 (actually more like 2000!) hours of conversion time
brings me back to my origonal question -
is there some way to simply rip the DVD to HD?

Just copy files from DVD to the HD, somehow adding movies names,
thats all. There are lot of programs able to play DVD file-system.
Maqcromedia is not worts here - deCSS is important.

C.