In Car kiddo entertainment...DVD/Other options?

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00clone

Well-Known Member
Apr 12, 2011
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Iowa City area
Hey fanatics, need some advice.

Headed on a long car trip coming up, and the missus wants to buy a portable DVD setup to help keep 'em quiet. I am not a movie watcher, and we have a barely used DVD player in our house, other than that, it's cable.

I tend to think that DVD's are on their last leg, and I suspect bluray will not be long for the world either with streaming, but we're not streaming ready either. I thought the tablet route, at least we'd use those outside the few long car trips a year, but not sure how much is available for offline viewing...like you wouldn't be able to do netflix in the car on the backroads to northwest Iowa.

Thoughts/ideas?

*Edit: Ok, let me go back to the beginning and say that I'm specifically looking for advice on an electronic video type solution, not "OH, MY, GOD, DON'T LET YOUR KIDS WATCH TV, GET THEM A PUZZLE OR A COLORING BOOK OR A NEEDLEPOINT KIT"....and that we fully intend on using this electronic tool as ONE of our repertoire of tricks to keep the kids satisfied. We've gone on several road trips, and there's just times when all the other options aren't working...and we spend plenty of quality time with our children...any of you with a full time job want to say you exceed my 6.5 hours per day that I spend with my kids?
 
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IcSyU

Well-Known Member
Nov 27, 2007
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Rochester, MN
If you go the tablet route, rip DVDs to a computer and put them on the tablet or download DVDs to it before you leave.
 

drlove

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Mar 20, 2007
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I figured this would be a good Friday off-topic thread. What did you do during long road trips as a kid to pass the time. How did we survive without DVD players, tablets and stuff.
 

VTXCyRyD

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Sep 2, 2010
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If you have a Prime membership on Amazon go with a Kindle Fire Hd or HDX. You can download some of their free prime movies to watch when you don't have a wifi connection. My daughter uses it quite a bit.
 

ISUKing

Active Member
Apr 27, 2010
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Ankeny, IA
Risking sounding like my parents who thought VHS wasn't going anywhere, I feel like there is still quite a while before we see DVD going away, more than likely after your kids have outgrown the need for road trip distractions. At the very least, they will be around until your kids are old enough to figure out how to stream something on their own. I'm not sure longevity of the DVD medium should be in the mix.

That said, my daughter loves watching her "shows" on our little sub $100 portable DVD player.
 

Cybirdy

Well-Known Member
Sep 10, 2009
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Ames
How old are the kids? We are antiquated and use DVD's, mostly for the three and under crowd. But even then, it isn't much good for the 15mo old. Nothing keeps her still/happy for more than 10min at a time. I am already dreading our car trip in a few weeks. Our older kids (11 & 9) read books or do other activities.

With a tablet you could at least have some options of apps as well.
 

Cybirdy

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Sep 10, 2009
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If you did go the DVD route I would see if you have friends/neighbors who you could borrow DVD's from (maybe even a portable system) or check your local library. We can check out 10 DVD's at a time for a week and then renew them if needed. DVD's could be a very low cost option if you borrow.
 

MNCyGuy

Well-Known Member
Jan 14, 2009
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Des Moines
They're 4 and 1.5...they suck at all 3 of these games.

1.5 is the tough one because they don't sleep automatically anymore and they don't really entertain themselves yet. We drive home to Minnesota A LOT and when our son was in that age range we did one of two things:

-Whoever wasn't driving sat in the back with him so they could nip any crabbiness in the bud
-We drove at night. At dinner at home and put our departure time as close to his bed time as possible so he'd sleep.

Don't know how applicable either of those are to your road trip situation.
 

MNCyGuy

Well-Known Member
Jan 14, 2009
11,645
551
83
Des Moines
If you did go the DVD route I would see if you have friends/neighbors who you could borrow DVD's from (maybe even a portable system) or check your local library. We can check out 10 DVD's at a time for a week and then renew them if needed. DVD's could be a very low cost option if you borrow.

hell, even redbox wouldn't be that expensive and you can just swap them out at all your gas stops so you don't have a big stack of DVD's cluttering up your car.
 

Cybirdy

Well-Known Member
Sep 10, 2009
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hell, even redbox wouldn't be that expensive and you can just swap them out at all your gas stops so you don't have a big stack of DVD's cluttering up your car.

we we always take them out of cases and put in a CD case--have 3-4 soft sided ones hubby has collected free from vendors at conferences.