Most efficient solution for a home theater situation?

Question

I have a lot of movies on my computer. Even though I have 250GB of disk space, I'm almost out of room. I started to put everything on DVD discs, but now that I've done 100 or so, I'm feeling like I'm investing money in something that will become obsolete and will wind up taking up a lot of room. Rather then pick and choose what movies to keep or refrain myself from obtaining more, I'm looking to invest in a 500GB External Hard Drive.

..but I don't want to be limited to watching them just on my computer. I was thinking about getting a video card for my laptop that has an S-Video port and hooking it up to my TV, but I'm not sure if that even exists for laptops and/or if it'll look good. (I like that idea though because the external hard drive could be removed from my desktop and put on my laptop at my will, and I can carry the laptop downstairs, to friends houses, etc.) I don't have the money to invest in a projector, so that's out.

I'm looking for a cost-efficient solution.

Answer 1

I don't think you'll be able to find an inexpensive way add an svideo output to your laptop. You can get a VGA>svideo convertor...might not be easy to find, though.

Personally, I use a softmodded xbox with XBMC to play video files saved on a PC networked to the xbox...works great. Not very portable, though.