Well, if you can replace the CD drive with a DVD drive, and if the video card has some MPEG acceleration (anything made in the last five years generally will), you could have the computer/laptop BE the DVD player. It's just a matter of finding the same profile DVD drive, or getting an external one and gluing it to the case.
The pinouts for how they connect the display varies in a lot of different ways. Nearly as many as there are brands of display. If you can reverse-engineer the motherboard down to where the video signal is being generated (traces start where the wiring goes to the panel, and usually near the chip), then you can follow the traces back to the video chip, and potentially look up that part number to find out what pins generate what sort of signals. This will generally be DVI, which basically means the panel won't plug into anything but VGA DVI connector, which you'll have to solder up for yourself, and won't plug into anything but a VGA card with a DVI port - or this notebook.