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Help with ideas for a portable media player


Bob123

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Hello.  So I would like some sort of portable media player to put on the back of headrests in cars.  I currently have an LCD / DVD player that fits on the back of the headrest but in order to watch several movies means I have to carry around several DVDs which works but adding to the collection takes time and would be much easier if I could just use a flash drive or something of that sort. 

So far the idea I've formulated but haven't had time to work on yet is to use a raspberry pi 3 and a portable LCD screen that plugs into it.  It all sounds great but I'll need to come up with some sort of case, mounting, and cooling for the unit.  I'll also need some sort of front end, I know there are distros for that but the main concern is do I rely on some sort of remote?  I do like the fact that the dvd player I have mentioned above has buttons built into the unit.  I could use the GPIO but again that would make for a very custom case which might be more than I can do at the moment. 

My next idea would be to use some sort of tablet.  I don't want to spend a bunch.  I have a kids tablet and a kindle fire but believe it or not both don't do a very good job at playing mp4 videos.  And I'm not sure how converting the files will work.  It seems like when I convert a reasonably sized file to a tablet / phone size it gets larger not smaller.  So just a simple tablet that works good for watching movies, I could mount to a headrest, and I could just use the built in touch, would be perfect.  Again though I want to keep the price low as it'll only get used a hand full of times a year.

Any ideas or opinions would be great.  If you know of specific items please feel free to list them.  Some sort of portable touchscreen media player would be perfect.  Thanks.

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A simple tablet, that does playback extremely well is the Lenovo Tab A10-30 and there are may media players available for it that do playback fine. Plex for example can be installed and run locally without a server and plays back everything I've ever thrown at it.

Average cost for it tends to be €160 or your regional equivalent. 

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