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Comment by xnyan | Hacker News Reader

15 years ago I was on a date with a wonderful young lady. We had a picnic and I brought my (at the time) very modern projector to watch a movie, projected on a bedsheet in the woods. Windows Media Player refused to play the DVD. No internet access at all. I thought I had failed...until I remembered that I had installed VLC. Opened the VTS.VOB on the DVD directly and boom, the video started and played back without a single hitch. I was a tech hero that day.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for VLC!

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How did you power the projector? Did you drag a generator into the forest too?

He busted out the old hand crank projector of course.

I'm envisioning a UPS. Good question.

My bet is on ‘a car’. There are converters to power 220/110V appliances off a car battery.

thank you hacker news, asking the real questions here. i'll be very upset if we don't get the answer to this question. we must know every detail.

Inverter type, for example Honda 10i is portable and not that noisy :)

When the Blair Witch Project came out, my Uncle took his son and a few of his friends (Jr. High Age) out in to the woods setup a generator and a TV and they watched the movie in the woods at night. My cousin said they were so scared, but his friends still talk about it to this day when they get together.

I had a car, as others suggested.

Ha, I had the same experience on a date with my brand new tiBook in 2001 .. wouldn't play the DVD .. but VLC, which had been released around the same time as the tiBook, did though!

In my case, we'd carried my tiBook up to the lawn on the front of the Hollyhock house in LA (Frank Lloyd Wright house), and watched Blade Runner on a blanket on the grass with the house in the background, as that glorious California sun set in the distance. My date was most impressed that we were having an outside movie date in that way ... it was pretty neat to have such freedom on a picnic date. (She wasn't as impressed when I checked my email over the Ricochet modem I had though, even though it was frickin' awesome at the time..)

Been a VLC paid subscriber for almost 20 years now, as a consequence.

Look at that, we have a shared mac-windows love story...kind of!

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