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zander106 · Mar 3, 2004, 02:34 PM

As a prospective iBook buyer, I was curious if anyone has ever tried watching DVD movies that were ripped to their hard drive. On CNET's review of the iBook G4/800 they reported that watching a DVD full screen with sound on will drain the battery in about 3.5 hours. If I rip a DVD to my hard drive and play it off of there (full screen w/sound on) will I get appreciably more battery life? I assume that keeping the DVD drive spinning accounts for a lot of battery usage.

If anyone has any ideas let me know, thanks! This isn't a deal-breaker by any means, I was just curious if anyone had tried this and what their results were.

d4nth3m4n · Mar 3, 2004, 02:47 PM

you talking about the 700mb .avi rips? or an actual dvd disk image with the movie on it. ive done both, but i dont really watch the time.

my battery on my 14" will play a high quality .avi (divx doctored of course) for something like 4 hours depending on how i do with the backlight.

Dan.

Eug Wanker · Mar 3, 2004, 02:49 PM

You can watch DVD's off the hard drive no problem. The program to do the ripping is DVD Backup.

However, I don't recall it saving me all that much power. Plus, the discs are usually around 7-8 GB each, which means you only can save a few DVDs to disc before you fill up the hard drive. I don't think re-encoding to Divx or whatever is worth it, because the re-encodes take forever and the quality is worse (and you lose all the menus etc.).

zander106 · Mar 3, 2004, 03:57 PM

Yeah, I've ripped DVDs before with DVD Backup, and yes, I was thinking about just the "pure" DVD rips (using DVD Player on the VIDEO_TS directory), not encoding to .avi (takes too long, even on my current G4 1.25 Ghz desktop). 4 hours sounds pretty good though. Not that I'm planning on watching that long necessarily, but I just wanted to know how much more battery I could save by doing that instead of watching off of the DVD drive. Would rather not have to keep the drive spinning for two hours plus.

yoyoman · Mar 5, 2004, 02:23 AM

just get a battery attachment thing u place on the bottom for few hundred. that will make ur laptop worth wile espically on trips.