Portable player for personal presentations

[Skith]

My sister is a pathologist and asked me about portable players for giving presentations, but since I know little about the subject I thought I would post it here.

Someone told her about 3.5" DVDs, and she was hoping she could record a video and powerpoint presentations onto them and use a small portable player. I am not aware of any device capable of recording to 3.5" DVDs (other than camcorders), let alone play them back. Do such devices exist?

The smaller the portable device the better (at least smaller than one that requires a full size DVD. Preferably something that can fit in a pocket or purse. As stated, it needs to be able to play video and power point presentations (can those be converted to video?)

She does not have a high degree of (computer) technical skill, so something that can play files that require the least amount of conversion/encoding and fussing would be very welcome. Also, a device that does not rely only on internal memory (unless it has a fairly large HD type device) would be a big bonus.

Thanks for any help!

[redwudz]

How about a 7" LCD screen portable DVD player? You can find them in most larger department stores, like Target or Walmart. If it will play MPEG format, that would make it a little easier, as you don't really need a authored DVD for PowerPoint presentations. A remote or wireless pause would be handy also. Most DVD players and recorders can use the smaller discs, but they may be harder to find. I would just use a full size DVD disc.

You can look around in the 'DVD Players' to the left and select 'Portable' and the size of the screen and get a few products that might do the job.

If you get much smaller than 7", then something like a IPOD or similar with video capabilities might be better. Then you wouldn't need a disc, just record the presentation onto the hard drive or a SD ram card or similar.

There a bunch of programs to convert PowerPoint to video. Just do a Google search for 'PowerPoint conversion to video'.

[Skith]

Thanks for the info, I really wasn't sure what the market for such devices was like. This definately gives me a better idea so I won't go looking for something that doesn't exist :P

[MJA]

I saw this 6.5" Widescreen on buy.com $79
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=202791045&adid=17662