I've copied DVD's of a lecture series onto a second hard disk drive (HDD) and have been able to successfully duplicate DVDs from these ISO files. However, I was really hoping to be able to simply click onto these HDD ISO files to playback the movie/ lecture. Is this 'directly' possible?

I'm running Windows XP SP2 on a P4, 2.8GHz CPU with 1.5GB dual channel RAM. I've got two 120GB HDDs with one drive dedicated to the 24 (90min lectures) i.e. 24 x 4.5GB ISO files. I also have MS Media Player 9, Cyberlink's OEMv of ' Power DVD XP' and Ulead's OEMv of 'MovieFactory 4 se' loaded.

It seems you can't play movies/ DVDs from just ISO files on a HDD. Is this the way things have to be? Is there a way to play ISO files/ i.e. the lectures directly off my HDD?

You could try VLC player http://www.videolan.org/ not quite sure if it works or simply mount them using DaemonTools and use your favourite media player.

Not sure if VLC will work - I know it'll play VOB files, I've never tried with ISO files.

Though I do know if you use a virtual drive (such as SlySoft's Virtual Clone Drive) you should be able to mount/load the iso file into the virtual drive similar to inserting a DVD into your real DVD drive. Then it'll play on whatever DVD player program you've got on your computer.

VLC plays the ISO files just fine. Just start the app, and then drag the ISO file into the VLC menu.

Media Player Classic plays ISO files.
http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=...Player_Classic

Using a image mounting tool like DaemonTools or VirtualCloneDrive will work also