[cutman]

I have a lot of long flights ahead, and I want to make sure that I get the most out of my Powerbook battery. I am primarily interested in watching movies on the airplane.

If I rip the DVDs and store them on my hard drive, will that improve my Powerbooks battery? I figure DVDs drain the battery so fast because of the constantly spinning optical drive, and I can cut that out completely by playing the movie from my HD.

Does this make sense? Does it make any difference?

[scratt]

You are going to be doing a lot of Hard Drive access instead.. I think you will still go through your battery pretty quick.. It's not like the iPod where the data can be cached.. Movie data is so much larger and therefore your Powerbook will be using the Hard Drive all the time.. So another motor spinning and heads moving..

Also you are going to be using the screen, and I presume sound...

All in all not great for battery life.

Why not throw the goggle box away for a few hours and re-discover books.

[Brad]

Yes, this is something many people do and will help the battery last longer on the flight. It's still not going to be a fantastic length of time, but it'll be better than reading off of the DVD.

[ast3r3x]

I'd compress the movie to a high quality avi or something. 800mb, probably doesn't have to read the HD as much.

Isn't there a power adapter so you can keep power to your book?

[Paul]

Only on certain airlines/flights/planes/classes
Jet Blue has it on all of their seats. But you DO need to buy an "air" adapter. I have the kensington auto/air/wall adapter and it works great.

[lewd0006]

Dont forget to turn off airport!

[gjas15]

just wait for tiger and h.264... i bet if you encode a dvd that way it would save your battery quite a bit... unless it takes too much cpu power to decode

[chucker]

Originally Posted by cutman I have a lot of long flights ahead, and I want to make sure that I get the most out of my Powerbook battery. I am primarily interested in watching movies on the airplane.

You may want to look into newertech's battery upgrade options. They provide greater-capacity batteries at http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/powerbook/batteries/

If I rip the DVDs and store them on my hard drive, will that improve my Powerbooks battery?

Yes, but hard drive access is not easy on the battery either.

Does it make any difference?

Yes, it should.

[alcimedes]

Turn off bluetooth, airport, and dim your screen. A few notches of brightness on your screen will more than make up for ripping your movies to the HD.

brightness is the evil of all batteries.

[cutman]

Thanks for the suggestions. I looked up those NewerTech batteries, but it appears they don't sell any for the 17" Powerbook.

I already have a spare battery that I bought with my original purchase, so I will have 2 batteries for my 14+ hour flight.

I can't wait for Tiger and that new codec...that sounds perfect, and I forgot about it until one of the previous posters mentioned it.

Thanks again.

[Ebby]

While compressing the movie may reduce disk access, it also boosts processor use. The biggest drain for my battery is the DVD player and, like you said, copying the DVD to the drive greatly enhances my battery life. I can play 1 movie and a bit more if I use the DVD drive, but I can watch 2 if I copy them to the hard drive. I'm not exaggerating; I tested this. (And the battery was new.)

[Jay]

You can also reduce your processor speed, it shouldn't hurt play back much if at all. Then you would save energy and reduce the amounts of heat produced which should keep the fans off and saving more energy.

[flail]

I want to do exactly this.. Rip DVD to a high-quality AVI, not neccessarily sized to burn to a CD, just to access on the HD.

My question: Does DVD2oneX do this well? Any other app recommended? Thanks in advance for your help.

[fneeb]

Originally Posted by flail I want to do exactly this.. Rip DVD to a high-quality AVI, not neccessarily sized to burn to a CD, just to access on the HD.

If you can spare the HDD space, you'd be better off not encoding the DVD at all. I'm not sure what there is for OSX that can play .vob files, but decoding MPEG-2 in real time is a lot less CPU intensive (and therefore less battery munching) than decoding something like divx or xvid.