Watching DIVX movies on laptop cdrom

[Kulgan]

Does anyone know of a program that I can use to slow down my Dell's 8X/32X DVD-ROM? When I watch Divx movies on the plane on my laptop, the cdrom spins full tilt and besides being noisy it also eats my battery. It actually uses more juice than watching a DVD movie! (It actually slows down to DVD 1X speed when watching movies) Since Divx is a highly compressed format and needs little cdrom bandwidth, does anyone know of a program that I can use to slow down the drive?

 

[beat mania]

the laptop usually comes with some sort of utility from the manufacturer that you can control the cdrom for either max performance or max battery life when it is on life support.

I would suggest looking for a download at dell.

 

[Auric]

Do you have spare HD space? It is running anway and is quiet so copy it over first.

 

[Fandu]

Ya, if you slow down your drive, the movies will being to stutter during keyframes and scenes with lots of action. Some of my high bitrate movies will not even stream off a 48X drive let alone a 32X. Your best bet is likely to just copy the movies to your hard drive and play them from there, it'll likely be easier on your batteries as well. But DivX is going to be harsh on batteries ether way simply because it requires so much processing to decompress.

You are correct, DivX is a very highly compressed format, and I'm not exactly sure why the drives are not able to stream directly off the CD. Maybe it has something to do with the codec loading an entire keyscene to RAM...? I'm not exactly sure. But I have not been able to stream high bitrate movies directly from the drive.

 

[Kulgan]

I actually did have problems with stuttering that is until I turned DMA mode on my dvd drive. I guess I'll just copy the movies into the HD then