The Onboard Video System

The Onboard Video System

The onboard DVD setup consists of a Viewsonic ViewPanel VP-151 computer monitor, a Toshiba SD-2109 DVD Video Player, and a pair of computer amplified speakers.

The DVD player has an S-Video output which can be directly connected to the VP-151 S-Video input jack to produce very nice images. The audio output from the back of the DVD player is connected to the amplified computer speakers (the display has speakers in the base but we remotely mounted the base and had the panel hanging on a bulkhead) and you have a very energy efficient system.

The DVD player consumes about 10 watts average and the display consumes about 20 watts for a total of 30 watts of power to watch a movie. This same technique can be used with a VCR but my current VCR seems to consume quite a bit of power while running and video tapes tend to grow things in humid conditions which gum up the heads. However, the VCR does provide a tuner which allows the setup to display television pictures.

I have been pretty pleased with this setup, additionally, I have a desktop computer built into a corner of the boat and the display serves that purpose also. However, the computer draws about 100 watts of power so you don't want it running very much. I will talk about desktop computers at sea elsewhere.