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Streaming Media in Car

TonyP

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Like myself I am sure many of you have small/young children and have the joys of enduring longish car trips where the boredom eventually creeps in, and as we had a pending trip to Ireland and back I decided that streaming movies wirelessley to the kids iPads was the answer.

I have tried various solution over the past few months with little success, these varied from
  • Portable wifi hot spots allowing the fancy head unit and iPads to connect to it and then stream videos. This failed due to the wifi hot spot not having enough features.
  • Using a old wifi router instead of the hotspot, but this ultimatley also failed as I hit a issue with a 5V 2A power supply.
  • Setting up a Raspberry Pi with a usb wifi dongle and usb mem stick. This failed as the OS was getting corrupted with each power cycle.

In the end I decided that on a full blown wifi router that ran off 12V and had a USB port that allowed streaming. So off to PC World I went and had a look to see what they had....

So, ended up with a tp-link tl-wdr3600 router, for £49... http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/comput...-band-wireless-cable-router-21341801-pdt.html

TL-WDR3600.jpg
Whilst I was there, I looked at USB powered portable hard drives and ended up with a WD 2TB jobbie for £89... http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/comput...le-hard-drive-2-tb-titanium-21807036-pdt.html
WD Ultra.jpg
Purchased a cheepo box from Maplins.... and we now have this:
Box01.JPGBox02.JPG
As you can see I used a connector on the power cable which allows me to power it from either the car or the mains supply (important for when we get there are the kids are bored with nothing to do).

So, removed the router from it's box and fitted to new box:
Box03.JPG

and then also velcro'd the HDD to the lid of said box:
Box04.JPG

Once all connected up and the wifi setup with a basic password etc, I then shared out the HDD as a media share and connected the iPads to the router:
Wifi01.JPG


So the tricky part was finding a App for the iPads that would play the various formats that my DVD's were in (VOB, MKV, AVI). I tried quite a few and in the end settled on VLC player. Much easier on the Android devices (I used Bubble UPNP and VPlayer).

Browsing the network I find the router and can browse the folders/files:
App01.JPGApp02.JPGApp03.JPGApp04.JPG

And play them:
Play01.JPGPlay02.JPGPlay03.JPG

It worked really well and kids were happy to watch what they wanted. Streamed different movies to each of them without a glitch for the 13 hrs there and back. When I was testing at home, I had it streaming to 2 iPads, 2 android devices and the desktop pc all different movies and all without issues :icon-cool:

The only thing I will change is I am going to look for a small 12V battery with charging circuit, as every time you turn the LC off and then start it again it kills the power to the accessories and resets everything :violence-shootself:

So all of the above coma in at under £150, which I thought was a bargain, but I showed this to Crispin before I left and he said... "I am sure I have seen something like this elsewhere...." welll a quick Google revealed this product:
http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/comput...pid=display~RR~Computing+Accessories~21248452

1TB with a 10Hr battery wifi streaming device..... Damm, wish I had seen that before I started. The only limitation I can see is that it is limited to 3 streams
 
Nicely done and very inventive Tony.
 
Superb work.
Out of interest, being a technophobe, the wireless drive you linked - could presumably be used in the house as a "stand-alone" wireless backup device ? ie accessible via any of the home pc/laptops without using the existing wireless network?
 
Superb work.
Out of interest, being a technophobe, the wireless drive you linked - could presumably be used in the house as a "stand-alone" wireless backup device ? ie accessible via any of the home pc/laptops without using the existing wireless network?
Not looked at it in detail, so not sure. I do know on routers like I used you have the option of sharing out the usb port allowing you to copy files to and from it.
 
I understood about 20% of that Tony, but it looks just like what I need!

I'll paste the thread to my IT guy in work and see what he can make of it!

Thanks for the nudge... :icon-biggrin:
 
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Hey Tony, this is excellent & has me going :drool:

How tricky is it to get the whole thing configured from a slackass IT gimp point of view?

Since Father Christmas brought the kids their HUDLs etc, our broadband is taking a beating so I'm upgrading the router in the house to a beast; I presume the hard drive can be simply plugged into any router & streamed from there. I'm looking to have the same sort of system in both the house & the car :icon-cool:

Cheers
 
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