I recently got an old HP laptop (5-6 years old) that I want to turn into a movie player, connect to the TV and play movie.
Currently its running windows 98, but I'd prefer a version of linux that uses less resources so the movies would run a bit smoother. I'm looking for a recommendation for distro of linux that doesn't use a lot of resources, laptop friendly, not too hard to use and can support multiple languages.

I thank in advance to anyone who makes a recommendation.

gentoo linux (google it I'm not allowed to post urls yet) is good for configurability and can if set up right do exactly what you want. It doesn't need previous knowledge of linux, but a little is useful. The major downside is that the portage package managment system compiles from source meaning a slow install, but a well configured PC and streamlined setup at the end which will glean the last drop of performance from your pc.

On the upside the documentation is excellent with full install docs as well as a thriving wiki and forum community.

You could also look into the MythTV range of distros - also check www.distrowatch.com for listings of distros.

And welcome to LQ

thanks for the help but I couldn't figure out if gentoo will work on the laptop since I can't register to their forum for some reason and mythTV is more advanced then I need.
what I basically want it to do is play movies I make in divx or xvid from a cd as soon as I put them in like a dvd but with computer video files, so you got something nice and simple for me (keep in mind that except messing around with knoppix a bit I don't use linux).

Yes, gentoo is a good distro for that purpose but a bit hard to install, although the installation is admittedly such a great learning experience. What you need after that is the latest version of 'mplayer' compiled with the 'win32codec' USE flag present in your make.conf file (if i'm not mistaken)...and you should be good to go...Also try installing a light weight window manager like fluxbox which doesn't use much resources...I suppose going for Gnome or KDE would hinder your lappy's performance.

cheers