LAPTOP: How best to save battery life when watching a video

[JImmyK]

Hey guys so Im curious what is the best way to watch a movie on a laptop and use the least amount of power?

Shall I bring the DVD itself?

Rip the DVD onto my local machiens HD

Play the Movie off a USB connected HD

Or play the movie off a external CF card using a memory card reader (not microdrive)

Thanks!

 

[River Side]

if you have a powerful enough CPU you can make it run slower.. also turn off the wireless, network, and any other peripherals that you can..

biggest draw is the LCD and sadly u can't dim it for the best viewing pleasure..

 

[WackyDan]

Rip it to the Hard drive, which would eliminate the DVD drive as it's going to read from the DVD and then cache to the drive anyway...

If you have a large enough flash drive ( and fast enough), then that woul dbe a bit more power efficient than the HD>

 

[RaiderJ]

I would think a solid state memory card would be the most efficient, but in practical application may not save you any battery life over the other two options.

My brother's laptop has a ATI video that does hardware decoding, which I believe also saves on battery life (less CPU utilization). Maybe your machine has hardware acceleration you can enable?

 

[JImmyK]

Im running a 1.83 GHz dual core setup
7200 RPM HD
17 inch UXGA LCD 1920x1200 (does lowering resolution help at all?)
x1400 ATI radeon
The ati software has an option to optimize for battery operation which I have on (im guessing it lowers clock speed and memory speed

Funny thing sometimes my DualCore runs at 1.83 ghz when Im working and other times at 1.00 ghz when Im just browsing the web (lowers clock to save speed). Is there anyway I can force it to stay at 1.00 GHZ when watching a movie?

 

[Mday]

put the movie on the hdd.

remove the dvd drive. remove any external storage. remove any pccards or whatnot. no usb devices. turn off wireless if you're not using it.

 

[Ayah]

Get a 32GB (or bigger if you can fork over a couple hundred grand) SSD, stick windows or another OS and movies on it. disable all unused equipment, downclock as much as possible

 

[movingincircles]

put the battery icon on max battery

reduces the speed of the cpu

i doubt u need full speed to play movies anyways

 

[RaiderJ]

Originally posted by: JImmyK
Im running a 1.83 GHz dual core setup
7200 RPM HD
17 inch UXGA LCD 1920x1200 (does lowering resolution help at all?)
x1400 ATI radeon
The ati software has an option to optimize for battery operation which I have on (im guessing it lowers clock speed and memory speed

Funny thing sometimes my DualCore runs at 1.83 ghz when Im working and other times at 1.00 ghz when Im just browsing the web (lowers clock to save speed). Is there anyway I can force it to stay at 1.00 GHZ when watching a movie?

That screen is going to be your biggest battery drain. Lowering your resolution might help, but you'd look silly watching a movie and not using the full screen.

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: JImmyK
Funny thing sometimes my DualCore runs at 1.83 ghz when Im working and other times at 1.00 ghz when Im just browsing the web (lowers clock to save speed). Is there anyway I can force it to stay at 1.00 GHZ when watching a movie?

Google "SpeedSwitchXp" Install it, then while on battery, set the power mode to "Max Battery". It'll prevent your CPU from upclocking itself, no matter what you do.

 

[Trey22]

I was wondering the same thing OP.

What I do is rip the DVD to my HD. Then I use earbuds and lower the screen brightness ALL the way down. I turn off my network (wired & wireless). Even then, I can't get through a 2hr movie on my 600m.

 

[corkyg]

All really good suggestions. I like ripping the DVD movie to the HDD - then maybe converting it to MPEG4 for portability.

I travel a lot - overseas and domestically, and have never had an occasion to watch a movie on battery power. For that, I would use my Zen Vision player. I keep 2 or 3 movies converted to MPEG4 on it all the time. But - those times have never happened.

Good thread - lots of common sense solutions.

 

[oog]

it may make sense to see what format of video allows you to have the lowest cpu utilization. it's likely that your cpu can run more slowly with certain kinds of video. this usually means that you're increasing the size of the file to something that is less compressed, though.

essentially, though, your biggest battery drain will be the lcd.