[ltp] Watching movies off compact flash?

[Crispian Thorne]

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In just over a week I'm off to Boston for LinuxWorld. This will mean a 4
hour train journey each way on Amtrak, and as I'm not travelling
"business class" I'm pretty sure there won't be AC outlets to plug in to.

So... I'm very interested in maximizing my battery life on my T21 so I
can watch movies to while away the time. I have a couple of ultrabay
bats & 2 main systems bats I can rely on, and I've found that Ubuntu &
Xine seem to do a nice job of throttling back to only what's needed
while watching a movie. I've ripped and compressed the movies I want to
watch (DVDShrink- I knew there was a reason I let the wife keep a Win98
box in the house) so's I can use an ultrabay bat & save a few ergs of
power not spinning a DVD. But I've been thinking... If I put the movies
on a compact flash card & stick that in my ultraport cf reader, won't
that use even less power? I mean a cf card is solid state- no moving
parts, so that's gotta use less power than spinning the hard drive- right?

I did a little test by sticking a 5 minute trailer on a 256 MB cf I have
for my camera to see if the card can be read fast enough, and it seemed
to do fine. And I can grab a 2 GB cf card for just a little over $100
(and it can also be used in my camera).

So what do you think- is it worth it, will it actually use less power (I
have no idea how much juice these things need), or would this be a
complete waste? Thoughts please...

- --
Crispian Thorne
linux@crispian.org
*linux & lovin' it*
Linux User # 329400
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