Possible to put dvd drive in old laptop?

[butch84]

I want to get an old laptop and try to put a dvd drive in it, among other things. Would that work? I suppose drive standards have changed quite a bit since the days of the mobile pentium 150mmx laptop. Oh yea, i guess it wouldn't be able to run dvd decoding software anyway huh? No room for decoder card either. Oh well, i appreciate your thoughts anyway.

 

[pikasub]

I think the playback would be very choppy since you need something like a p2 300+ to do software decoding at a smooth speed

 

[VBboy]

Yep, that computer is far too slow to do any software DVD decoding.. besides, your videocard is so slow that it wouldn't be able to push enough pixels anyway

 

[vegetation]

It's time for a complete upgrade. Old machines can only do so much.

 

[hans007]

with a margi card or something, its possible

 

[bacillus]

not worth the cost & effort required!
cpu is also too slow for reasonable s/ware decoding.

 

[butch84]

So how fast would the laptop need to be? P2 300 range? Are new laptop dvd drives compatible with old laptops?

 

[jschuk]

With an MPEG2 decoder card, DVD playback would be possible. To use one, you would need a PCMCIA port with zoom video "ZV" support (usually the botton slot if yours supports it). As long as your current CD-Rom is a 6x or higher, than you "should" have no problem putting in any CD-Rom/DVD that you would like. Would be good if your machine has DMA capabilties.
I was able to play DVD's in my wife's laptop with only about 4 pauses/stutters during a 98 minute movie. This was with software decoding and her machine was a PII266 with 96MB of memory at that time.
Also, if you have a passive matrix screen then forget the whole idea.