What I want is basically a portable DVD library. I was given the BBC Planet Earth series on DVD in exchange for some proofreading (it’s magnificent) and now I’m halfway through the BBC Blue Planet series (also magnificent). When I next go to New Zealand I want to take them with me, but without lugging around cardboard boxes and plastic discs. Ideally the gadget will plug into the tv, but also have its own screen for playback in the airplane.

What I’m imagining is something with a large hard drive (a few hundred gig) so I can just put ISOs of my DVDs on it rather than messing about with ripping to video formats (and losing extras, subtitles, menus, etc etc). I can sort of see why googling hasn’t turned up anything suitable yet: I call this my portable media library, but the BBC would probably call it a pirate’s dream.

My fallback position is just to get a big external hard drive and plug it into my laptop for playback. My tablet has a usb connector (which lets it function as a usb drive), but no usb socket (for plugging in usb drives). At 16G internal storage it’s far too small for carrying the library around, but it’s fine for airplane playback. Annoyingly, though, if I keep the ISOs on an external drive then I’ll still have to use my laptop to transfer them to the tablet,⁴ and I rather suspect I won’t find a DVD ISO player for android.⁵

So, gadget freaks, any ideas? Am I stuck with an external drive and a laptop?

Notes:

1. An iLiad from iRex, now retired. I’m considering getting a nook, kindle, or similar up-to-date equivalent.
2. Eee pc, now retired. Since I got my work laptop, hilariously overpowered as it is for day-to-day casual use, the poor wee netbook just doesn’t cut it any more. Once you’ve gone SSD, you can never go back.
3. Samsung Galaxy Tab, ordered in a fit of madness to be delivered the very day I left for a month-long holiday in New Zealand. In daily use, which I mention just to prove that not all my gadget purchases end up cast aside when the next shiny thing comes along. Although in this case the next shiny thing hasn’t actually arrived yet.
4. Is there any tablet on the market that lets you plug in a usb drive? Power consumption would be a problem, I imagine.
5. Encouragingly, VLC is being ported to Android. No timeline though, and ISO support will depend on the codecs being available.

But this weekend I’m off to Berlin for a week, where I will give three talks (two of them more working-session-ish, but still a pretty serious workload). Two of the three aren’t really written yet: I planned to do some work on the train and some work there. So I needed a machine, and fast.

Which is by way of semi-justification of the fact that this post is written on my brand new eee pc. It’s a teeny-tiny laptop and so far I’m very happy.¹ I’ve got it running an eee-friendly ubuntu flavour (easy peasy), and while I write this post Amarok is playing my music for me. Most importantly, I’ve installed latex and emacs and all the bits and pieces I need to work on my talks for next week. Success!

So: the laptop is dead, long live the laptop.

Notes:

1. The only major snag I’ve run into is the half-size right shift key, which means I keep hitting ‘up’ or ‘enter’ when I want uppercase. But I’ll get used to that, I’m sure.