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
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
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
Purchased a cheepo box from Maplins.... and we now have this:
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:
and then also velcro'd the HDD to the lid of said box:
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:
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:
And play them:
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
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
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
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
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
Purchased a cheepo box from Maplins.... and we now have this:
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:
and then also velcro'd the HDD to the lid of said box:
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:
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:
And play them:
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
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
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
