movie from rip or dvd?

[RamarC]

I'm going to be travelling a bit and want to watch movies on my laptop.

Which will offer longer battery life -- watching the movie from the DVD disc, or ripping the movie and watching it from the hard drive.
If ripping is better, which encoding is better from a battery standpoint -- mpeg2, wmv, nero mp4?
Lastly, if I'm using mp4, will putting the movies on a flash drive improve battery life?

 

[SexyK]

IMO watching the rip will be more power efficient. The hard disk is going to be spinning either way, but with the DVD the DVD drive has to spin constantly as well. I don't know for sure but i'd suspect that the least compressed format (mpeg2would be the most power efficient, because with higher compression ratios the CPU will be doing a lot more work which equals shorter battery life. I don't think using a flash drive would give you any batterly life improvement, the flash disk is just another component to suck power. Those are my thoughs, but maybe someone will have a different point of view.

 

[SickBeast]

Funny, I almost think the DVD will be more efficient when it comes to battery life.

The hard drive doesn't always need to be spinning to watch a DVD; all that you need is a decent amount of free RAM.

MP4 will make things worse because your CPU will be taxed to oblivion.

The flash drive might help. I would just leave it on the DVD tho; it's simpler, I think it's the most efficient, and it's the least hassle.

 

[RamarC]

i had some time today and did some informal comparisons. using nero showtime 3, i played a ripped dvd (vob) on disc that caused cpu utilization to hover at 8-13% on my p4d 945. playing the same passages from a nero mp4 (non-avc) encoded at 1Mbps resulted in 7-10% cpu utilization. the mp4 quality appears slightly lower than the original, but certainly good enough for a flight.

now i question if my radeon video card is causing the low utilization figures. my c2d laptop has an intel gma so i don't yet know if i'll get the same results on it.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Playing from hard drive > playing from DVD.

I'd just invest in an extra battery for your laptop if you're really worried.

- M4H

 

[RamarC]

i finished the run down tests on my laptop, and the mp4 rip "wins". using vista's balanced power profile and forgetting to turn the wireless antenna off, here are results after 55 minutes of playback of crash via nero showtime:

dvd disc: 53% battery remaining, 117 minutes projected battery life
mp4 rip: 57% battery remaining, 127 minutes projected battery life

as on my desktop, dvd playback cpu utilization (about 18%) was higher than mp4 playback (about 14%).

considering the mp4 rip is about 1 gig per 2 hours, it won't be hard to have 15 or so titles on the laptop. they're certainly easier to carry than 15 dvds.

 

[Captante]