One challenge when traveling for extended periods (or even short periods if you're a tube addict) is keeping entertained while far from the home TV remote.

If you've only got a couple of weeks in some fabulous new place, of course, you won't want to spend evenings watching TV. But if you're on business in a town you've been to a dozen times before? Or you're posted for a couple of months to foreign climes?

It's a problem my wife and I face every winter when we head for southern Europe to wait out the Canadian winter (we're working snowbirds), and we've found a few solutions.

One of the simplest is illegal in the U.S., but not (yet) in Canada: ripping DVDs to a portable hard drive and taking them with us. I confess we don't even buy the DVDs; we borrow them from our local library. (We don't keep the videos after watching, however, and we don't give them to anyone else, so nobody loses by it.)

You'll need a DVD ripper program like AnyDVD from SlySoft (a hefty $65.) It lets you rip DVDs as easily as you can CDs. It used to be you also needed a special program to play the raw .VOB files ripped from a DVD, but now Windows Media Player plays them.

You can fit a lot of movies and TV programs on one tiny hard drive like the two-year-old 500GB Hitachi SimpleTough USB drive I carry. This particular unit is ruggedized, but I still stow it in my laptop bag just to be safe.

Once you're established in your home away from home, plug the hard drive into the computer, use an HDMI or other cable to connect the computer to a TV and it's showtime. (Note: you'll also have to pack the appropriate cable.)

There are other ways to skin this cat, of course, easy ways if you're traveling in North America, less easy if you're going overseas. We'll look at others in a future column.

Article Tags:  travel, Blackwell, DVD, HDMI, rip, record, hard drive, rugged, entertain, remote, snowbird, TV, television, movie, video, SlySoft, AnyDVD, VOB, file