I have a 6.1 home theater system with a Sony amplifier and, among other things, a DVD player. It's old and does not play some MPEG4 videos that use newer codecs. Rather than buying a new DVD player and running into some sort of similar problem in the future, I want to replace it with a laptop. Some laptops, such as Dell D600, have a S-video output plus headphone output. I can feed these into my amplifier, but I want to do better than that. I would prefer digital rather than analog output, just like I now have with my DVD. What are my options? I probably need some sort of special audio/video laptop card. Do such cards exist? Is there a better solution? Thanks much.
your best option in this case is to just do some google searching to see if you could find a card that would do that for you. but since it is a laptop, you are going to be severely limited to your media capabilities. you could build a computer to serve as a HTPC (home theater PC), I did, and its amazing. plays anything you could ever want and everything is highdef, just need an amplifier and the sky is the limit
Unless you are planning on integrating your home theater into a Desktop PC somehow the way Jason has suggested this is a really bad idea. For one thing you do not want to put the wear and tear that you will on an expensive laptop and for another by the time you purchase the hardware to make this possible you could just by a DVD player. That way when it stops working you do not have to repair an expensive laptop you just have to buy another DVD player. Progressive scan dvd players are not that expensive. Anyway I don't think that you are going to get the results from a laptop that you are looking for. To me this is the last thing a hardware manufacturer would be expecting you to try and do. You could do it with a desktop PC but if all you want is to play DVD's you do not need to do that either. Hmmm lets see, an expensive desktop computer or an inexpensive dvd player, which do I choose?
well if all you are wanting to do is watch dvds, then yeah a good progressive dvd player (maybe one that upscales to higher def if you want to spend the extra money) is all you really need.
what i am suggesting would only be a good idea if you view a lot of those pesky files that are tricky to burn to dvd without special software that changes the file type.