watching movies. Downsize to save battery?

[Bottomsup]

hi

i'm about to take a trip and have some HD movies on disk i want to watch. Is it worth my time to re-encode them to the resolution of the MBA to save battery power decoding them since the extra resolution is wasted anyway on this little screen?

If not I'm just going to load them up and go.

Thanks

 

[amarcus]

Downsizing the videos generally won't gain you an appreciable increase in battery life. Having said that, re-encoding your videos can still be useful if the videos were previously in a format that is not accelerated by the GPU (but presumably after encoding will be). When your playing the videos if you have high CPU usage then it's safe to assume that they are not GPU accelerated and therefore could benefit from re-encoding.

Adam

 

[Ridley]

Downsizing the videos generally won't gain you an appreciable increase in battery life. Having said that, re-encoding your videos can still be useful if the videos were previously in a format that is not accelerated by the GPU (but presumably after encoding will be). When your playing the videos if you have high CPU usage then it's safe to assume that they are not GPU accelerated and therefore could benefit from re-encoding.

Adam

What encoding and player is GPU accelerated like this?

 

[jdechko]

H.264 is accelerated in iTunes/QuickTime on Rev B, C, and D MacBook Airs (the models with the 9400M or 320M).

Handbrake can handle the conversion for you.