Wire your DVD player up to your laptop!

This suggested that one could hook one's DVD player up to one's laptop via a "video capture card with USB" and it was right! The configuration took some struggling with. I ended up winning with NTSC_M_J as a video decoder setting. Why would I do this? I had a hand-me-down television from my sister, but I managed to screw it up. I did not actually watch a cable TV feed on it as I do not pay for one. I only used it to watch DVDs. I went to WalMart in the middle of the night and found TVs pretty expensive. I ended up paying less than $30 for a "video capture card with USB" instead which takes in a DVD player's signal via three female RCA connectors (as you might expect to find on the back of a television) and then talks to a laptop across a USB port!

A DVD player will also have female RCA ports on it and a male-to-male RCA cable is always used to talk from a DVD player's female ports to the female ports on... whatever. In my case the free end of the male-to-male cable went into the adapter I bought.