When I go through these long travel periods for work, I like to be able to take some brainless entertainment with me on the road. Not having Tivo to go, and not willing to pay $8-$12 blood money for a pay-per-view movie. My friend aaron had the good idea of taking ripped DivX-encoded movies on his laptop when he was out of town for a long time. I figured that this would be a perfect way to work through a lot of the Netflix queue (I’m not in to the whole .torrent piracy aspect).
So I downloaded mplayer and mencoder for my PowerBook and started ripping. At about 600 megs per movie I’m able to fit 6 or so full-length features in the normal amount of extra space that I have (I carry around a lot of music as well). The biggest problem I had those was with the playback, that mplayer very often couldn’t keep up with the video and the sound/motion would always get out of sync. So badly sometimes that if I was using my laptop at the same time I was watching a movie I’d just give up on watching anything and listen to the audio only.
Along comes VLC (Versiontracker page), a fantastic playback device that so far has been rock-solid for my on whatever I watch. So now I’m totally happy with this setup and thought it would be a worthwhile suggestion to make.
