We're traveling to Spain and Ireland for three weeks. I'm bringing the netbook, not the 17" MacBook Pro, because it's small and light. It doesn't have a DVD player and I'd like to bring some DVDs to watch. I could either spend about $80 on an external DVD player, or I could rip the DVDs beforehand.

I've ripped a few DVDs with Handbrake, an open source, cross-platform video transcoder, which seems to do a good job. I'm playing them in the cross-platform VLC player, which released version 1.0.0 yesterday, after almost 8 years of development.