Laptop battery life

[rivan]

Which will give me better battery life: playing video from a DVD or playing video ripped from the DVD (or an image... whatever).

Is there a way to push cacheing of video on a lappy with a couple gigs of RAM to reduce reading? I presume this is player dependent - any players that let me do so?

 

[Matthias99]

The DVD drive generally eats up more power than the hard drive. This means playing files off the hard disk will be less draining on the battery.

Is there a way to push cacheing of video on a lappy with a couple gigs of RAM to reduce reading? I presume this is player dependent - any players that let me do so?

Some players let you set how much RAM to use as cache -- if you have enough RAM, and you set this value high enough, they may cache the whole file.

Also, you could load the file to a RAMDrive and play it from there. Then you wouldn't be using the hard disk at all, regardless of player.