Tech – for Everyone

Tech Tips and Tricks & Advice – written in plain English.

Quick Tip: Movies on the plane

Make Your Movies Truly Laptop Friendly

DukesOfHazzard_JessicaSimpsonIf you know you are going to be traveling, and you want to bring some entertainment with you (namely, movies), such as the best film ever made — The Dukes of Hazzard, today’s quick tip is for you.

Tip of the day: The energy required to spin the disc, and power the laser beam inside your DVD (or Blu Ray) drive is hard on your laptop’s battery, and can drain the charge rather quickly… maybe before the movie ends.

The trick is to “rip” (geekspeak for “copy”) the DVD to a file, and keep the file on your hard drive, or a thumb drive. Playing the file (watching the movie) this way is less work for your computer and your battery will last longer. Kind of a “must” for those long flights!

Today’s free download(s):
For simple, one-click “rips” of your DVD movies, bitRipper is hard to beat. It was a for-pay utility, and now is available for free.

And for those of you who want to watch your movies on an iDevice, HandBrake is a highly recommended Open Source tool to consider. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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July 10, 2009 - Posted by | advice, computers, how to, PC, performance, Portable Computing, tech, thumb drives | , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

2 Comments »

  1. TechPaul,

    Great tip! I’ve also found that running the movie from the hard drive, the movie plays better as well.

    Rick

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    Comment by Ramblinrick | July 10, 2009 | Reply

    • Rick,
      Hmmm… that could be considered an asset too, now couldn’t it?!

      Thanks for dropping by, and keep up the great work on What’s On My PC?

      Like

      Comment by techpaul | July 10, 2009 | Reply


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