Laptop battery with DVDs

[mmclo]

I was well pleased to ahve revived my old laptop to play DVDs but less so when the power went from 98% to 8% in a minuite when playing DVDs, others don't seem to have this problem. There is no problem on mains.

Could this be related to DVDs as a particularly power hungry application or perhpas the laptop isn't charging right??

 

[car]

Playing dvds is a very heavy resource on the CPU and hence eats battery power. Also if you think about it, youre driving extra hardware, ie, the dvd player.
However, 98% to 8% in minutes is just wrong, support call for me. ahh. sry , reread, its an older laptop. New battery for me.

 

[ClubMan]

Perhaps ripping the DVD ISO image to your hard disk and playing it from there might reduce the power consumption requirements (i.e. eliminate the need for power to the DVD drive)? However if you're only getting a minute of play time then perhaps you are never going to get a full movie out of your battery? What lifetime do you get out of the battery under normal use?

 

[zag]

If it is an old laptop then the battery is just out of condition. I think it is possible to recondition through a series of full charges and discharges, but in reality it's just an old laptop with an old battery which is failing.

In terms of the DVD - the thing is you are using a lot of power (relative to the rest of the bits of the laptop) physically spinning the DVD, and also decoding the data so it will use whatever charge is stored relatively quickly.

z

 

[ClubMan]

Perhaps ripping the content of the DVD using something like DVD Shrink (which will use lossy compression to reduce the size usually without affecting perceived quality) and playing it from hard disk would help. A colleague of mine uses it to aggressively shrink down movies for playback on his Windows Mobile PocketPC. The usual caveats about respecing copyright/licensing apply.