WiFi Monitor w/Sound?

This is kind of off-the-wall, but I've been looking for something that would let
us watch a DVD anywhere in the house - without moving a lot of equipment/wires
around.

Actually, an AC connection would work. It's just the idea of a DVD player,
cabling it to a TV and so-forth that bugs me.

To that end, I've been looking at

- Portable DVC players (looks like $300-400 for a decent one)

- Something Sony calls "LocationFree" ($1500 suggested retail, $800 for a repack
from Sony). http://tinyurl.com/cq4gu

- A subset of the LocationFree system ($350 suggested...) that would allow
interfacing with an el-cheapo laptop ($600 or so). http://tinyurl.com/b3ecm

The screens on the portable DVD players' I have seen so far are too small (10"
max).

LocationFree (12" screen - a little small, but would probably work) looks like
one of those great ideas that's not quite ready for prime time - and besides,
Circuit City has the thing lashed down so there's no way to check range. Also,
the battery that comes with it is only touted for 80 minutes - so I figure it's
more like an hour...

The LocationFree subset plus a laptop looks to me like it might be feasible but
the unknowns are:

- Drive noise on the laptop. Dunno if it does a lot of disk access or not when
just streaming video.

- Battery life on the laptop. Dunno what WiFi does to battery life. OTOH,
going back to the single AC cord....


Anyhow, to cut to the chase, it seems like if there were a WiFi device that
could be piggybacked on to a lightweight LCD TV, one could stream the video from
a PC's DVD drive throughout the house to the piggybacked WiFi device. Thus
cutting out the middleman (a PC processor).

Not exactly squeaky-clean because the two AC wires and duct-taping the WiFi
device to the back of the TV wouldn't be very pretty... but it seems to me like
it would work: one AC cord, a device that can be picked up with one hand and
relocated easily....

Anybody have some thoughts on this?


--
PeteCresswell

(PeteCresswell)

Per (PeteCresswell):
>Anyhow, to cut to the chase, it seems like if there were a WiFi device that
>could be piggybacked on to a lightweight LCD TV, one could stream the video from
>a PC's DVD drive throughout the house to the piggybacked WiFi device. Thus
>cutting out the middleman (a PC processor).

And, of course, what should have been obvious to me right from the start:

- Some sort of local re-broadcast device that does the same conceptual thing as
WiFi (i.e. it replaces a wire that carries a signal) but which uses different
technology - assuming that there may be throughput issues with 802.11...
--
PeteCresswell

(PeteCresswell)