Blu-ray In Laptops Could Be Hard On Batteries

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 29, 2008 @02:35AM from the power-vampire dept.

damienhunter notes a Wired story on the power-hungry ways of the first generation of Blu-ray players coming soon to a laptop near you. "With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba's HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups. Next month, Dell will even introduce a sub-$1,000 Blu-ray notebook... But the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology's vampiric effect on battery life. Indeed, if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say."

1 of 202 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

720-1080P MKVs don't have this problem by dalmiroy2k · 2008-02-29 02:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

Last night I played Transformers 1080P Blu-ray rip (10GB MKV file) in my Vaio VGN-FZ340E.
I used "Media Player Classic" with latest K-lite codecs, using the just the stock battery and a medium power saving mode and everthing went fine for the entire movie.
Yes, playing this files may not be legal but I just don't see a better or legal way to do HD with my current hardware.
Same thing happens if you try to play a Blu-ray movie (Assuming you have a drive) with Linux.