Turning your laptop into a portable video/DVD player

Sometime back in 2005, when I was servicing a laptop, I notice that it can actually bootup as a portable DVD players without booting up the Microsoft Windows. I know that the laptop actually had two partition. The first being a Linux partition of around 80MB and the other the normal Windows partition.

I was very curious, unfortunately, although I manage to get hold of the setup disc, I was unable tochave it running own other brand of laptop. The drivers that the setup CD provided are restricted to that machine.

It was not only later that I come across a good software call GeeXboX that provides a linux live CD that make it so easy to customise for different machines. It has a customisable CD option where only necessary drivers are loaded into the CD. One can then transfer the CD image to the Harddisk on your laptop. The only problem is normally your laptop is 100% filled up with windows partition. You can use partition magic to reduce the partition to make way for your DVD/linux partition.

Normally I do that manually, I run a scandisk and optimisation to make sure that the last sectors are free from any data, then I simply used fdisk to reduce the partition without reformatting. CAUTIONS - possible data lost at your own risk. So far I have no problem with my laptop.
My laptop has bootup problem but is easily fix by twitching the GRUB bootup command.

Joost gave up its P2P player

I received an email from Joost
"..we have decided to discontinue our original Joost software application. As of Friday, Dec. 19th, you will no longer be able to watch videos in the Joost software application – but you will be able to find all of our videos, and more, on Joost.com."

Finally they give up on this fancy players of theirs and move to the browser. This is not surprising as the effort takes to maintain both platform is simply too much. I wonder will other video sites follow suit or have already done so.