21. Video - QuickPlay

The DVD button on the remote leads directly to video mode without requiring any menu navigation. The configuration menu for installing audio or video settings is accessed by pressing the "Fn+ESC" keys.

In fast-moving scenes during DVD play, the player may drop a few frames, as evinced by some slight skipping or jerking. We'll have to wait to test a production model of this device to see if these problems persist in the commercial release. But it's great to be able to press a button inside Linux to redirect the signal to the S-Video output on the notebook and to pipe the video over an S-Video cable to an external TV set.

An onscreen menu allows for installation settings to be tweaked during playback.

Once the switch is made, image and audio playback moves to the television. The remote manages video controls; but audio becomes the province of the TV or its remote. Those who want to enjoy multi-channel audio can use the headphone jack on the dv8000z to switch to digital-audio playback mode or to connect to a multi-channel sound system.

It's truly vexing that DVD playback under Windows also becomes glitchy from time to time. Among other things, this caused problems for us when running MobileMark DVD benchmarks. We can only hope that this problem is limited to our prototype unit, and won't affect production models.

Because of problems with DVD playback, MobileMark05 declined to post any results for this test.

Turning Off S-Video Output Also Turns Off Audio Out

The following task proved difficult: When running QuickPlay, if you switch a unit that is driving a TV set from video playback to audio mode, the S-Video output is deactivated and the notebook display is turned on. But what's unfathomable is that at the same time, audio output is also deactivated and audio only works on the internal loudspeakers. Unfortunately, this doesn't do much for users who want to play their audio CDs or MP3 collections through an external sound system using this notebook.