First, I move my laptop over to the shelving unit housing the home theatre. I doubt many vacation rentals come with such nice television set-ups. It includes a 32-inch Philips LCD flat panel and Philips 5:1 home theatre surround sound system with DVD player.
Because any DVDs we brought from home wouldn’t play on the DVD player (different format, regional locking), it’s pretty much useless to us. But before we left, I ripped a whole bunch of DVDs from the local library to a portable drive (see earlier post).
I plug an HDMI (digital high-definition) cable from the TV into a port on the laptop and an analog cable from the home theatre sound system to the audio-out port on the laptop. (The HDMI cable, which I brought from home, should carry the audio as well as video, but doesn’t – because of a bug in the software I’m using, I think. Hence the analog audio connection.) Giorgio, our landlord, lent us an adapter that lets me plug the left and right audio channels to the home theatre system into the laptop’s speaker port. Finally, I plug the portable drive into a USB port on the laptop. All set.
We use Corel WinDVD9, software that can play DVDs in the laptop’s DVD drive, but also DVD files stored on a hard drive. (I didn’t compress the video using anything like DiVx – these are raw video files straight off the disc.) Using WinDVD9, I browse to the folder on the portable drive with the ripped videos, choose the sub-folder containing the programming I want – and WinDVD9 begins to play the video.
My laptop, a Dell XPS M1330, actually comes with a tiny remote control that hides away in the Express Card slot.
It gives me basic Play, Pause, Stop, Skip and volume control functions. And that’s it. Picture quality is superb – DVD quality. Audio quality is also excellent, though sometimes we have to adjust levels in a few different places to get enough volume. Occasionally we’ll get incoming e-mail notices from Outlook popping up on the screen. Otherwise it’s flawless.
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