Playing movies on a Netbook?

Our soon to be 4 year old son loves to watch movies while we travel places in the car and his little portable DVD player is on it's last leg (real cheap one). Anyways my wife and I were looking at just maybe getting a netbook instead of another DVD player, then we realized that those things don't have cd drives on them. We watch alot of movies on Itunes etc at home instead of DVD's. With the little memory the netbooks have does anyone have any ideas as how to make them work for watching movies on trips. Girl at Best buy said to get a portable DVD usb drive, if I am going to lug all that around I might as well just go buy a 13" laptop instead.

We are wanting a netbook so that we can use that instead of having to take our laptop with us or rely on hotel business centers when we need to access stuff. But are really hoping we can make it work somehow to let him watch movies in the car.

Thanks

Rip them to divx and store them on the hard drive.

Honestly i might recommend the 13" laptop.. you can get ones that are almost as light as netbooks. I have an hp dm3-1040us that is only 4 lbs, but has plenty of hard drive space for movies. No dvd drive, but if you watch a lot of downloaded movies, it may not be a problem. The benefits are more HD space, generally a better graphics card, and often a much better screen for watching movies on.

If you do go the netbook route, make sure the netbook has plenty of memory for video files. Also, i've heard netbooks arent always the best at video playback due to their lower specs, though it would probably depend on the quality of the video.

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Originally Posted by alarson

Honestly i might recommend the 13" laptop.. you can get ones that are almost as light as netbooks. I have an hp dm3-1040us that is only 4 lbs, but has plenty of hard drive space for movies. No dvd drive, but if you watch a lot of downloaded movies, it may not be a problem. The benefits are more HD space, generally a better graphics card, and often a much better screen for watching movies on.

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Agreed

In short, you've got three options.

1. Download the movies (illegally).
2. Rip the movies and encode them (also illegal).
3. Use itunes or amazon or the like. (legal)

If you get a mobile broadband plan you might be able to stream netflix or something.

Netbooks are good for lots of things, but watching DVDs and movies in general, is not one of them (unless you generally don't mind breaking the law).

Most netbooks can keep up with DVD quality video. Some can, with proper software, play back 720p and some even 1080p video with decent results, though it's somewhat pointless due to the tiny screen.

Storage-wise, you can get them with fairly large hard drives. My Mini 10 has a 160gb hdd. For downloaded content, that's about 200 or so DVD quality movies, so that's really not a concern, IMO.

Buy a portable external USB DVD-ROM drive. When I got my first netbook two years ago, I found one on ebay for $20, including shipping, but these things are in greater demand now that netbooks are more popular.

Just an example of what to look for, I'm not endorsing this, just picked it out from 30 seconds of browsing on ebay:

USB External Portable Laptop DVD-ROM CD-RW Combo Drive - eBay (item 160403478516 end time Feb-15-10 21:29:03 PST)

I have a Lenovo netbook and I just bought a nice slim portable DVD-RW drive for $40. It fits in the outer pocket of the neoprene sleeve, so not really a big deal to lug around.