Most Efficient Play on Netbook: DVD or AVI?

[chinook9]

Correction: Make it DVD, AVI, or MP4?

In the next few months I will be watching a lot of videos on very long flights.
I have an ASUS 1005 PEB netbook with Windows 7 Starter edition and I have KMPlayer Portable, Media Player Classic Portable, and VLC Portable.
I can put the DVDs on the hard drive of run them from a large flash drive I have.
I will buy CoreAVC if it will help.
I would like to use the very most efficient video format possible.

Would I use less battery if I re-encoded the DVDs to MP4 or AVI? I'm not concerned about using space on the hard drive, I just want the format that will use the least battery.

I would appreciate any recommendations.

[Baldrick]

If you have lots of hdd space don't convert. Just store as dvd isos and play with vlc. MPeg2 playback shouldn't take that much cpu.

[chinook9]

If you have lots of hdd space don't convert. Just store as dvd isos and play with vlc. MPeg2 playback shouldn't take that much cpu.

All of my DVDs are stored as VOB files. Is that the same as far as efficient play goes?

[redwudz]

If you have a 1.6Ghz Atom CPU like my Asus Eee, VOBs or DVD files are the best bet. You can use Xvid/Divx if you need to conserve space. My netbook can't quite play HD MKVs as the processor/GPU isn't quite fast enough. MPC-HC works well for me and seems to use a bit less resources than VLC. But I keep VLC handy for odd formats.

I got my Eee for long flights also. And being able to drag it out for checking my email at airline terminals.

[chinook9]

Thank you for the information. I have lots of HDD space, so it will save me a lot of time that I don't have to reencode a bunch of videos. Thanks again!

[chinook9]

Well, I have tried a few experiments, encoding on my desktop and playback on my netbook, and the results are a somewhat confusing.

I did a number of MP4/x264 encodes of small (600 MB) VOB files. I encoded the clips at high quality, using AutoMKV, and they play much better than the the original VOB files themselves. (I used DVD Shrink to cut a couple of chapters out of DVD files.)

I tried KMPlayer Portable, MPC-HC Portable, and VLC Portable and I get the same results with all of them. I was under the impression that the MP4/x264 files would require more processing but that does not appear to be the case.

Anyone have any explanation for this? I would rather just play the DVD-VOB files but the picture is unacceptable.