How can you store and access a 5000 plus DVD movie collection digitally?

You could create digital back-ups of them all onto a server. The problem with this is the time involved in backing each DVD up, not to mention the need of a physical server (computer), software, network, and general know how. If you have the time then all you need is a computer with a lot of hard drive capacity (depending on the quality and quantity of the DVD rips it could be as high as 8.45Gb per DVD), a network to share it on, and the ability to play it on something, such as having a laptop on the network. You could also play them off the computer you store them on. There are a handful of programs fro rippings DVD's, some of them free, such as DVD shrink.