On Monday 06 October 2003 02:22 pm, marcia wrote:
I would love to use my laptop for watching TV or playing DVD's in Suse 8.2. I have a Compaq Presario 1700T with a Pentium III 700 + megahertz and 300+ megs of ram, 40 gig harddrive. I would need to purchase the correct card or whatever for watching TV and purchase a DVD player. I am interested in maybe getting a usb CD/DVD player that is externally connected and that will work in Suse 8.2. I would like an inexpensive one as well if that is possible.
For watching TV I was told to get the ATI ALL-in One Wonder or something like that. Is it possible to ride across country in a vehicle and watch TV on a laptop? If not, watching DVD's will do for me.
Any ideas and suggestions about this will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Marcia
Marcia - First you would need to get a USB 2 PCMCIA card and a USB 2 DVD player. USB 1 will not allow you to get a fast enough flow of information into your computer to support uninterrupted DVD watching. It is marginal at best but not likely to be easy. Second to use a USB 2 PCMCIA card you will need to upgrade to at least the 2.4.21 kernel and use the 2.4.21 kernel based PCMCIA package. This isn't simplistic to do but it is possible (I have it setup on my laptop now but I am not running SUSE on it (as opposed to SuSE ;-)). Second, you should consider a USB TV device like a WinTV USB. There is no PCMCIA TV controllers that I am aware of, and you can not install an ALL-In-Wonder card into a Laptop. Last time I checked, you can get support for the WinTV USB cards within Linux, but I haven't really tried it myself. This will actually work over a USB 1 connection. I hope this helps you out. You may also want to consider checking with Compaq to see if you can get an internal DVD player to replace your built in CDROM device. If you can, you may be able to find a used but working one somewhere and would lower your overall cost and the need to cart around an external device (you may even be able to watch DVD's on planes this way). Good luck.