The Laptop as a Home Theater?

m.o asks "I am going to buy a laptop soon, and I was wondering if I could find something that would also work as a home theater, i.e. I could connect it to the TV and play DVDs and also connect it to several speakers (say, four speakers and a subwoofer) for the sound. Are there laptops like that? What is the minimum/recommended configuration for such a thing?" Hmmm....interesting idea. Gives me a reason to go out and snag another laptop! *grin!*

Things to look out for

[Benley]

I don't know about anyone else, but I have definitely never seen a laptop with 4-speaker sound output. I know there were some Powerbooks with 4-some speakers, but aside from that I've never seen any laptop with built-in sound that would be anywhere near what you'd want to deliver DVD sound to a home theatre.

You also want to keep in mind that the quality of the tiny amplifier and DA converter in most laptops is not up to par with the rest of the audio world.

On the video side, finding a laptop with a DVD drive isn't that hard anymore, but I imaging finding one that can effectively play fullscreen video with motion compensation may be difficult. You may want to consider a PCMCIA hardware decoder card [lsilogic.com] like this one [lsilogic.com] from LSI logic (look at the webpage, it seems like if you buy one, they even give you schematics for the thing! There is also the Margi DVD-to-go [bernclare.com] card, which I know little about. I also found one by Cadmus [cadmusmicro.com] that looks promising.

There's also the DVD decoder card buyer's guide [7thzone.com] for PCMCIA cards, but that page seems to be thoroghally fubar'd from Netscape.

I wish I could afford some of this stuff myself!

Simple..

[Useless]

Powerbook 2000, a.k.a. Pismo. Actually, its what I'm posting from. But it is perfect for what you're looking for. S-video out, software, built in DVD player, just add a 1/8th to RCA jack (real short cash at Rat Shack) and you have a portable DVD player, plus a kick ass portable to boot (and yes, it runs linux too).

Re:Things to look out for

[costas]

I own a Gateway Solo (PII 300PE) with the Kingmax DVD PC card you mentioned and a G1 DVD (Matshita). I've had it hooked up to a 40" TV and a 4-speaker Dolby-able stereo. Quality of picture and sound (including high-speed motion) was exceptional (at least equal to component DVD players I've seen). Problems I've had:

Only one movie had motion compensation problems -- "Ronin" during some action sequences. And if you've seen "Ronin" you understand. But this may be related to...

... a short time later, the player started seriously skipping. Since the laptop was under warranty, Gateway fixed it. No problems since.

The really irritating thing about having a laptop as a component is the lack of a remote. Also the fact that if the laptop starts doing anything, for any reason (say fetch e-mail, start a virus scan, etc) the DVD will most likely skip.

OTOH, all this was with a first generation (1x) DVD and 64MB of RAM ... I think they're up to 4x DVDs now, so skipping should be much less noticable...

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Powerbook 2000 (Pismo)

[Myrcurial]

The company bought one of these for my web-designer wife last week, and we had a blast watching DVD movies on our home (untheatre-like) setup. Beyond the fact that it's the coolest hardware out there today, it played several DVD movies flawlessly and output with the included SVid->composite adapter was still several times better than ExpressVu on the same setup. The audio was great (once I figured out that the DVD player sound control is a subset of the system sound level) and the machine says it can output Dolby to a compatible receiver. Remote control was simple - just put the powerbook on the coffee table! All in all, this is one really sweet machine for all round use, and excellent at several other things.

Now if only she would let me put Linux on it... sigh!

M

Gateway Laptop

[soulsteal]

I have one [P2 266/64MB/6.4GB] with DVD and it has excellent sound jacks in the back. Haven't had a chance (or need) to use the s-Video outs on the back yet, but the DVD plays well on the LCD with the hardware decoder that came on it. It's pretty sweet for the 700 I paid.

Re:Powerbook 2000 (Pismo)

[lilwonder]

"Now if only she would let me put Linux on it... sigh!" What's it worth to ya? lw

My experience :

[Betcour]

I bought a Dell Inspiron 7000 a year ago - with DVD. These were cool, as the laptop has a hardware MPEG2 decoder included. I use it along with the TV out as a DVD player and it works flawlessy (except for the Windows DVD player bugs, but that's another story). The only drawback is that there's no multichannel sound out, so I have to do with the default stereo out.

The problem now is that Dell no longuer puts a hardware decoder for its DVD enabled-laptop, instead relying on the pseudo-hardware decoding of the ATi video chipset, which is not as good as a real hardware decoder.

Gateway Solo 9300

[BinMan]

This laptop has a S/PDIF output which when plugged into a dolby decoder will create surround sound. There's also a row of buttons along the fron which allow you to play a DVD when the case is closed. I'm waiting on the ati mobility 128 tho'

No remote problem...

[Masker]

Of course, if you had a Palm Pilot, you could probably write a Linux daemon to listen to an IR port and retrieve IR packets, acting as a remote control. In fact, someone may have already written one... (checking Freshmeat... AH!) Ok, you actually don't even need a Palm Pilot. Take a look at the pix-IR-remote project's home page [wat.jeet.nu]. It looks like you could develop a small script or program to grab the bytecodes from an IR remote and use them to drive your DVD. I've not tried it, but you could and let us know.... That is, I'm assuming that the laptop has an IR port...

Re:Laptop as home theatre

[knowfear]

You wouldn't necessarily have to unplug everything every time. You could use a docking station for easy removal/connecting to the peripherals

Laptop PowerBook

[arska]

Hello

I bought some fruit: an Apple PowerBook G3 and I'm really impressed of it's inside and outside features..

http://www.apple.com/powerbook [apple.com]

Aarno

PS: LinuxPPC runs smoothly.. ;)

Gateway MIGHT work.

[FPhlyer]

I have a gateway 2500 (the economy end of Gateway's notebooks). Although it doesn't have a DVD, it does come with a "zoomed video" port - a composite video jack to allow you to connect the laptop to either an NTSC or PAL video device (you make this selection in the BIOS).

The proplem with the onboard zoomed video port is that it only produces output at a resolution of 640x480. I have been able to get this to work under SVGALIB (using the VESA driver) but under X I only get garbled output on the television. You may (shudder) have to use Windows.

Gateway has a number of good options for a laptop home theatre. Many of their notebooks come with PCMCIA hardware DVD decoders. I would suggest, however, that you get the optional docking station - it will speed up the time it would otherwise take to connect all of your devices.

An external wireless PS/2 or USB mouse would be a good investment... you'll want it for remote control. Also, a number of companies sell PCMCIA devices to allow you to receive cable directly to your laptop. This might be something to look at also.

A cheap home theatre laptop could consist of the old MPEG CDs. You can get MPEG movie CDs very cheap now (they are having to clear stock now that DVD has become the standard.

You have a lot of options to accomplish this. There are external VGA/SVGA to NTSC/PAL boxes available almost anywhere. This is a great option if you already have a laptop. Also, you can get a PCMCIA SCSI card (I use one manufactured by IOMEGA for use with their external SCSI zip drive. I works excellent under both Linux and Windows. My PCMCIA controller card has never worked under OS/2, so I can't help you there. With the SCSI, you can just get an external SCSI DVD drive. Best performance is with a decoder card!

A lot of people have posted comments about using an Apple Powerbook for Laptop Home Theatre. This is an EXCELLENT option if you are planning on buying a new notebook. Macs BREATHE multimedia, so you are sure to have a good experience (if you aren't anti-mac to begin with).

Have fun. Enjoy. Watch movie.

Laptop as home theatre

[daemonenwind]

DVD has three key benefits: picture quality, no rewinding, and sound quality.

For the first, does your TV have an S-video link? Chances are if it's an older model, it won't. That means your video output might not hook up very well...video cards tend to like S-video outputs.

For the second, you're good to go no matter what. Rock on without rewinds.

For the third, your sound quality will be poor from a laptop. Great sound cards are really hard to find for laptops, especially ones that can handle 4 speakers and a sub. You'll need to buy a dolby digital decoder, amp, and a full speaker package. But, by the time you finish doing that, you're already spending a lot on home theatre, probably nearly what you'd spend on your laptop alone. A desktop model could pull off the sound card for you, though. (Try the Xitel Storm Platinum...Aureal Vortex 2 based, included headphones are sweet, and it has digital TOSLINK out so you can copy MP3's to minidisc!)

One further caution...how hot is your laptop going to get running movie marathons, and how much (little) fun is it going to be disconnecting and reconnecting the laptop from your theatre when you want to take the laptop with you? Nice DVD players cost $250, and with a $300 Aiwa system with included subs, you can get a nice effect. Try your favorite online store.

"There must be something on this thing for that thing!" -Homer J. Simpson