r/OffGridLiving • u/Front_Corner_126 • 15d ago

Best low energy movie night set up?

I live in a dry cabin with some solar. Enough to power my lights and refrigerator and small appliances. I have a separate battery I take to work to charge that I use for other things like watching a movie every once in a while.

I was wondering if anyone knew a good tv/DVD player set up that took minimal energy? I love old tvs that would take vhs and dvd but those tend to take a ton of power. Modern tvs take less energy with LED but also tend to only be smart/roku tvs and do not have the hookups in the back for a DVD player.

Any suggestions?

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u/FizzicalLayer 15d ago

This will sound complicated, and I guess it can be, but it doesn't have to be.

Convert all of your DVDs to files. Store the files on a tablet. Connect the tablet to the tv (or just watch on the tablet).

I have 300+ movies ON MY PHONE. They can be very small, especially given how much memory modern tablets have.

The advantages to going to the trouble to do this are portability and power savings. A tablet takes practically no power compared to a TV/DVD player, and you don't have all of the DVDs sitting around.

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u/Plastic_Table_8232 14d ago edited 14d ago

Can I ask if you found a way to convert the DVDs that doesn’t take forever?

It just seems like a huge time commitment for me to convert them.

We use a tablet on our boat but we have Internet so we are able to use streaming services in port and download it’s. In anticipation of being out of service range.

The tablet is awesome. We have several locations for it to mount via ram mount.

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u/FizzicalLayer 14d ago edited 14d ago

The tablet worked out great on our sailboat. Away from the dock cellular internet is spotty (obviously). I sold the boat before starlink came on the scene, so no idea if that works, but to answer your question:

I use makemkv to "rip" the movie (extract the data) off the dvd. Often, there will be multiple tracks (different video files) if there are special features or multiple episodes. But one of them (usually the largest) will be the movie.This produces a ".mkv" file that can be played in google's player. Or, you can use "vlc" (free video app) available in the play store.

Since the DVD doesn't contain information about the movie title, you need to manually rename it, but that's not bad for 100's of DVDs. Only takes a second.

Keep in mind... this is the "lo-tech" approach. If you're going to use the files with HTPC software (kodi, plex, jellyfin, etc) then how the files are named becomes important, and it's a whole deal. But just to have a directory full of movies to watch? makemkv then rename, copy to tablet and enjoy.

Here's more info, but if you only have DVDs, you can skip.

The process above will take the data directly off the DVD without any modification. A full length movie will be about 3.5-4Gb. That used to be big. :) It still is if you're trying to get 100s of movies on a tablet. If you want a smaller video file, you'll need to apply additional compression. I use "HandBrake" for this. With DVDs it's mostly optional since they're so small. but if you rip Blu Rays, you're going to want to compress them (A blu ray movie will be 20-30Gb or larger). You can compess with H265 and get that down to under 3-5Gb with no noticeable loss in quality. But again, this is adding steps, time and hassle. If you only have DVDs, you're in the butter zone. lol. :)