WATCHING DVD ON EEE PC 900

Your EEE PC 900 or 901 is has a big 9 inch LCD screen. It would make a great DVD player when you travel or in the car. But the problem is that it doen't have a CD or DVD player within. The easiest way is for you to buy an external USB DVD drive and play all your DVD movies from the USB DVD player. But the disadvantage of an external USB DVD player is that it will use more power from your EEE PC battery and it also add more bulk to your travelling items, an extra thing to carry.

So, the best way is to convert your DVD movies to format which you can keep in the EEE PC hard drive or a large 16GB SDHC (An A Data 16GB cost around RM200 now). With formatting, you can keep around 12 to 13 full length 90 minutes DVD movies in a 16GB SDHC card. That would give you around 20hours of movie time.

There are several converters around for both Windows and Mac. What i use for my Macbook is Handbrake (http://downloads.zdnet.com/search.aspx?kw=dvd+ripper&osfilter=mac&licfilter=free). It is a freeware and does the job well. I recently coverted "Hancock" at it gives around 1GB in AVI format. It took about 1 hour for the conversion process. Sorry, i can't give any Windows software, since i don't use Windoze now. Hehehe!

For the Xandros EEE PC, it can read mpeg, ogg and avi format faultlessly. However if the movie is in mp4 format, you may need to downgrade the mplayer to an older format, which i did. You can try using this tutorial ( http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=937). But if you are not adventurous enough, just convert all your DVDs into avi format.

Don't worry if you are using a Windows XP EEE PC, the built in Windows Media Player should read the file well. However if you need to read divx or xvid movies, you need to install an older version of WMP. Google for it.

So, enjoy your movies while you travel. With a power inverter in your car, you can have 20hours of DVD movies while travelling. But since the EEE PC speaker is awful, you may need to buy an external speaker to get a better sound. It would be much better, if you can find a way to connect the sound to your car sound system. That would be great.

Now i am in the process of converting Dark Knight and X Files into avi.

Enjoy.