Hardware Device to Make a DVD Player Act Like a Hard Drive

Background

I'm always in the pursuit to maximize the utility and convenience of my Home Theater PC (HTPC). For me this means finding a balance between cost, performance, footprint and versatility. I want to be able to play DVDs, watch Netflix, YouTube and possibly even some light gaming. This is all available on a Windows platform, but that comes with the cost of a Windows license and the hardware to keep up with Windows bloat. I've tried Linux, but it just doesn't support Netflix reliably. Android has everything except DVD support. There are some new Android mini PCs that would work great if I could just find a compatible DVD player.

While searching for DVD drives I found other people who want to access DVDs on other devices. It seems that hard drives will work on EVERYTHING...TVs, phones, tablets, computers, etc. Why can't DVDs have the same support?!

The Idea

We could solve everyone's DVD problems by creating a hardware device sits between the DVD player and the computer / TV / android device. The device would read the DVD player but make it look like a hard drive to the computer.

I know that this device is 100% possible. In the worst case scenario the device is a mini computer that plays the DVD and transcodes it into an MPEG file. I guess basically a hardware transcoder. That's not cost effective. To be cost effective it would have to operate on a very low level, reading the DVD to see what options are available, then present them as a limited set of files on a hard drive, each file name representing a different set of movie options.

I think the biggest hurdle is solving the problem at the file transfer level. You have to present files that are readable by the computer, which for really stupid devices means video and audio files. Dumb devices only know how to read different file formats, so how do you convert the request for a byte stream into a DVD read? It may not be possible to get that low. Maybe transcoding is the closest you can get.

Progress

 11/27/14 -I really don't have the background to research this device right now, and I'm not interested in learning that low level programming, so this idea is gonna sit on the shelf, probably forever.