What will play a vob format

First off, I am not a video person. I barely watch enough movies to remember that the shiny side of the disk goes down.

My school district wants to rip their DVDs (school made training and instruction disks, so just relax RIAA!) to a hard drive on a server and access it from a workstation. This is to solve the problem of missing and scratched platters that never seem to make it past one or two checkouts.

The windows solution that someone has proposed is several thousand dollars. Don't know why, since it is just an ordinary PC with a couple of huge hard drives. I told them that we could do it with Linux for just a few hundred dollars with a cast off PC for a server and two or three 400gb drives.

Sure enough, an ordinary Samba server works fine, but when I wanted to test it I had to go to a windows PC. I don't know what software for Linux will play video that is on a hard drive in vob format (I think that is the term). Totem will play a DVD, but apparently won't see the same format on a hard drive. Xine wouldn't. At least I couldn't make it see it as a playable video.

Anybody know what software will do what I want?

Thanks Tom Wiley