Extending battery life for playing DivX on laptop

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

bob194 <bob194@btinternet.com> wrote:
> Has anyone playing with using any caching or memory tricks to improve
> the battery life when playing a DivX from the hard drive of their
> laptop. I was wondering if I copied the DivX to my hard drive (IBM T40
> laptop) and then use my 1GB memory to best advantage might increase the
> battery time over the normal hour or so for DVD disks!
> Cheers

I've found that using vlc (www.videolan.org/vlc/) my cpu usage (Centrino 1.6
in a Tosh Satellite 329) went down to below 3% on average when playing an avi
(divx and xvid, encoded with the latest AutoGK as well as Dr Divx trial), but
when using zoomplayer and 'media player classic', cpu usage would hover around
the 40-55% mark. Same kind of results on my main system (P4 2.8 HT), although
the proportions were less extreme. I've found the same results playing mpeg2
files by the way.

My first guess was that vlc uses better buffering, but this is all so recent I
haven't had time to really investigate.

I've also played avi movies from a compact flash card. CPU usage seems to be
about the same - with vlc again using Much lower cpu - than when playing from
the hd. (This tends to reason against the better-buffer for vlc theory but
then speed of cf mem would be important and I haven't checked comparisons)

I sometimes use a powerpack that shows me watts being used, but only in
increments of 10 watts. I'm always showing 30 watts when playing a movie (20
at 'rest') no matter cpu usage or media (dvd, flash or hd). I haven't tried
putting the hd to sleep yet when playing flash though. Might show a
difference.

My second guess about the sharp contrast between vlc and the others is that
cpu activity depends somewhat on the video card/system being used, and that
vlc uses more of what my hardware has to offer, better.

Last observation: perhaps cpu activity has little to do with power drain, in
which case most of the above is trivial. Again, just got the notebook at xmas,
so this is all pretty new to me. Nex