Best format for energy-efficient playback?

[perfectpasta]

Hello, I apologise if this has been previously asked:

Could anyone tell me what the optimal settings are for video compression in order to drain a laptop battery the least during playback? I would like to put some videos on a laptop for a long journey and just wondering if encoding them in a certain format would make any difference to the energy consumption of my laptop.

For example, is it beneficial to have the video stored at a very low level of compression to save on processing time, or is it better to have the smaller file size to save on hard disk access?

I'd appreciate it if anyone could shed some light on this issue.

Thanks!

Rob.

[guns1inger]

The higher the compression, the more CPU you will need to decode them.

I suspect that the most energy efficient thing you could do would be to put the movies on a USB key or SD card (assuming your laptop has a reader, of course) and play them back from there instead of the HDD or optical drive. An 8 GB card could hold 10 Xvid encoded movies. Xvid is relatively light on CPU for decoding.

[jagabo]

Or MPEG.