Blu-ray Is Dracula For Your Notebook Battery
For now, the laptop manufacturers that have offered Blu-ray drives have also avoided revealing the precise effects of Blu-ray playback on battery life. That's probably for a very good reason, as some claim battery life can top out at one hour in some cases.
"The laser that runs the show [in Blu-ray players] is a very high-power laser," notes Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. That laser is one of the main things that conspire to raise power consumption.
The other part of the equation has to do with the process of decoding data from a Blu-ray disc and turning it into moving images on your screen. When Blu-ray was first introduced, this process was all done in software, which is very taxing on the CPU, eating up processing cycles and power.
As the drives become more common, improvements are likely to be made in video cards and CPUs to process the Blu-ray information more economically, power-wise; but for now, a Blu-ray equipped laptop should be considered a laptop-with-a-wire-next-to-an-outlet.
Comments
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No, it's pretty much all the laser. That's why I wanted blu ray to fail, so I could buy people's BD drives for cheap on eBay and harvest the expensive, high power lasers out of them. |
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Even regular DVD watching can drain it pretty fast I can imagine blu-ray would be even faster. |
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Definitely not a good thing. HD-DVD also uses a blue laser, so regardless whichever format we ended up with would have this problem =P. But you could always rip your dvd to your main rig and encode it to x264 for travel =P |
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Well I am not sure if any of you are familiar with it -- but why not implement a super-low energy state program (like HP laptops have -- Quickplay) that allow BD playback while not even having the PC booted up. It's kind of like a standalone super-low resource OS that does nothing but playback media for you.....might tide people over the time being eh? |
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A bit confused on what you mean, but the Blu-Ray drive would still eat up the battery since it requires a larger amount of energy =P. Could you elaborate a little more though? Not fully grasping what you mean. |
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I understand it still eats up a ton battery life -- but if there were more environments such as "HP's Quickplay" there would not be anything running in the background at all during playback; basically it turns a PC into nothing more than a portable DVD player. As we all know OS's constantly are caching, transferring etc.....among countless other functions/instructions per clock cycle, which undoubtedly uses SOME resources (including battery power); take these factors out of the equation; playback media in one's PC with the aforementioned environment/mock-OS, one could possibly have slightly increased battery life in general for playing back those coveted BDs. |
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Ohh ok! I getcha, basically like a portable dvd player...A feature to run just the dvd drive in a cinema state without anything else. That might lower power draw a bit...but not neccesarily sure =P. |
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Any reason to suspect that this is something that will not improve with time? Surely like all tech it will. |
ya , batteries improve , they may implement a way for the blu-ray to use less power . WHo knows wats in store in future . |
Crisis Causer:|
The solution is simple, in theory at least. We need better batteries. Maybe this will be enough to motivate R&D departments to kick it into overdrive and bring forth some serious improvements in battery tech. Although I think the biggest breakthroughs will come out of research for hybrid and electric vehicles. |
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sli in latops = more battery drain. cmon 28 min of battery life? |
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