Posted: 10/31/2009 4:53:14 PM EDT
| I am in the market for a new machine and am seriously thinking about a netbook as I really only surf the net to sites like this and research. Can you download movies onto a thumb drive to play on a netbook since they are too small for a DVD? |
|
You can:
1) Rip the DVD to something like a WMV file, at 640x480 resolution, and save that to a thumbdrive, or just copy it to the netbook's HD. 2) Rip the DVD to an ISO file, copy that to the netbook's HD, and use a Virtual DVD player to play it like a regular DVD. 3) Hook up a portable DVD player to the netbook, and just play the DVDs straight from it. I have done all 3 on my eeePC, and they all work fine. |
Yes, you can watch pron on a netbook! 
The issue is that there is no disk on a netbook so as the post above points out you're going to have to rip it and move the movie over as an MPEG4 encoded file and use a commonly available free viewer. Some of the DVD's now are coming with a free computer copy that I toss onto a thumb drive or share across the network to my netbook for long flights. Works great as my Dell Mini9 fits in a pocket and the battery lasts a good 4 hours. |
|
I too like the "idea" of the netbook concept, but I think in the end you'll just end up lugging around a bunch of additional crap to do what you want to do (external HDD's, DVD Players, etc...)
I travelled a lot for work and I carried a 15" dell workstation that weighed a ton, but it was powerful for what I needed for work. My wife was wanting a laptop and I recommended a 13" screen and she got a Dell XPS Studio 13. I was kinda using her as a guinea pig for my perfect portable laptop size and I'll say that a 13" (or 14.1" max) is the way to go with a laptop that you plan on traveling with or primarily use for surfing and email. I would look for a widescreen type laptop too for easier web use and movie watching. And I prefer the glossy screens mainly because it protects the actual screen surface better than the matte fabric type LCD's. I work on a black screen for my work (Graphics related) and you see every fingerprint and dirt splotch. Also when people store their laptops in their bags, they usually end up loading books, notepads, etc on top of the laptop and this puts weight on the screen and presses it onto the keyboard. My bosses MAC laptop has a permanent imprint of his dirty keyboard keys on his screen. It's powerful enough to do office related stuff, has the DVD-RW and enough USB slots and bluetooth and wifi for any add-ons. Best of all, it is really light when you have to travel. you have to factor in the power brick and we use a mouse with our laptops and that all adds up when packing up. I've seen folks working on their laptops at places with free wifi and it looks like they've pulled their 42" widescreen TV off the wall and took it with them. |