DVD vs vob vs VCD vs mpg

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I have a question about watching movies on a powerbook (pismo in this case). Given the choices above, which would be the best option for maximizing battery life. Is it better to just bring a physical dvd. Rip the dvd and watch it from the hd. Convert the dvd to a vcd and watch it. Or rip the dvd and convert into an mpeg and watch it from the hd.

I'm not as concerned about quality, I want to maximize battery life.

TIA
 
The mpg file would be smallest and on the HD so would need the least amount of power to playback.
Think about it, when you play back a DVD, your HD and your DVD drive is going - that eats more power than just the HD going. To minimize the HD activity, use a smaller MPG file than a multi-GB VOB file. OpenShiiva does a good job of converting VOB to MP4, so I would use that.
 
OK, here was some of my admintadly uninformed thinking.

If you're playing off the dvd, the hd would not be going (since unless the dvd player was causing swapping to occur and you have nothing else running, there should be no reason for your hd to be spinning all the time). Therefore the question becomes does it take more energy to spin the hd or the dvd (I would assume the dvd).

Secondly, that even if the mpeg1 is smaller than the mpeg2, that since their running time is the same, that the hd would have to spin for the same amount of absolute time therefore the hd utilization wouldn't be any better. I believe mpeg2 compression is more of a bandwidth and cpu hog, so the cpu would be working more to decompress the mpeg2 stream vs mpeg1.

So anyway, I end up with the same conclusion that you do, mpeg1 off of the hd. I was just wondering if anyone has actually played with this to get some hard numbers.

Thanks for your input.
 
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