Most Efficent For Media.

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Ok, it's one of the days we all hate!
Phoning your manager to tell him/her the dreaded
"I am sick" line. - which I am.

So since I have the joys of my bed, and feeling sorry for myself All day,
I have a question.
Using the new 17" unibody MBP with potentially 8+ hours in ideal conditions
which method would yield better battery life for media?
Media- in my situation is hundred of DVDs (movies, tv series) an all stored digitally on my PC.

Playing straight from DVD?
Streaming iTunes media from my PC to Mac?
loading AVI media to HDD?
Playing AVI media from USB pen drive?

Any thoughts? VIPeR
 
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A pen drive has no moving parts, and USB in general can't demand much power, so I'd personally say USB key.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Late 2013 rMBP, i7, 750m gpu, OSX versions 10.9.3, 10.10
I'd have to agree with S.SubZero here.

Straight from DVD will be terrible as now you're driving the DVD player which will most definitely absorb more power then a thumb drive.

Streaming would be nice, but network activity usually causes a power drain, and unless you plan to drape a cable over your bed, I'd assume you were planning wireless which will tend to drain a battery faster

AVI from HDD - well, unless you have a SSD for your main storage, your hard drive will consume more power then the thumb drive. If your HD can sleep while you're playing a movie, you'd get better battery life as you won't be wasting power on the motors of the HD

So, it would appear the best option left is the thumb drive. Of course, the negative is if your movies are large, you won't be able to fit a lot on the thumb drive, which would require a lot of up/down. While you're sick it may be worth the loss in battery life and use wifi to stream the video from your pc where it is all stored, and when the time comes plug into AC - all of course depending on the size and quantity of videos you want to have access to.

This is, of course, completely ignoring the thought of having internet access, which then if you're already using the wifi, the extra drain of the constant stream of the video might not be as big of an effect.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
12" Apple PowerBook G4 (1.5GHz)
If you don't have an SSD as your internal HD, you could use an ExpressCard SSD (on the 17" or older 15") or an SD Card (on the newer 15" and 13") as your boot and media storage volume. That would be the next best thing to an internal SSD hard disk, better than using a USB flash stick.

A 16GB ExpressCard SSD is about $85.
 

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